iiil pill ii#'''''-': EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY BY KATE GORDON Assistant Professor of Psychology, Carnegie Institute of Technology. Formerly Head of Department of Education at Bryn Mawr College NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1917 COFTRIGHT, 1917, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY TME OUINM * OOOIM CO. PRESS PREFACE The course of study which this book presents is designed for students of pedagogy in colleges and normal schools. It presupposes an elementary knowledge of psychology. In the earlier chapters, on the growth of structure, and of sensory and motor capacities, a certain amount of child psychology has been included. Not every item so included will be found applicable to teaching, but the aim- has been to give to the student a general survey of the phenomena of growth. In later chapters, as on memory and rea- soning, the procedure of certain class experiments has been reported in some detail, because they are not published elsewhere, and it may seem desirable to the instructor to duplicate them in laboratory exercises. The last three chapters take up some of the concrete questions of teaching in three quite dissimilar school subjects. They are intended to illustrate the way in which psychological applications can be made. m 2051092 CONTENTS CHAPTER PASE I Introduction 1 II The Growth of Human Structure 15 III The Growth of Behavior. In- stinct 32 IV Instinct, Continued ... 46 V The Growth of Behavior. Motor Capacities 58 VI The Growth of Behavior. Sen- sory Capacities .... 80 VII The Learning Process . . . 101 VIII Imagination 127 IX Observation and Report . . 149 X Memory 156 XI The Growth of Beason. Logical Relations 180 XII A Study of the Syllogism . . 189 XIII Other Aspects of the Thinking Process 206 XIV The Transfer of Training and of Ideas 218 VI CHAPTER CONTENTS XV Attention, Feeling, and Will. . 226 XVI The Psychology of Language Teaching 240 XVII The Teaching of Drawing XVIII Akithmetic References Index 260 270 283 291 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER I INTKODUCTION The Purpose of Educational Psychology. — Psy- chology is made up of a body of facts, ideas, and methods of investigating the mind, which have grown up more or less in isolation from practical questions. In the business of teaching, on the other hand, prac- tical questions cannot wait, they have to be dealt with somehow and at once. Hence a body of tradi- tion and a set of practical maxims which we call pedagogy has formed more or less in isolation from systematic science. Educational psychology is the attempt to bring these two together. It is the appli- cation of the methods and the facts known to psy- chology to the questions which arise in pedagogy. Subjects, however, cannot be applied to one another in any final or wholesale fashion: we must be con- tent with such points of contact as can actually be proved to exist. I once heard a lady say about a young man, " Yes, he has been to Harvard College, 2 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY but he doesn't apply it to daily life." ISTow, it is hardly right to censure either the young man or Har- vard College for this, — or even daily life. Applica- tions are not of this large sort. So it is with psy- chology^ and pedagogy, they cannot be laid down one upon the other so that all the edges fit. There are parts of psychology which have no bearing upon pedagogy, and there are questions in education which admit of no psychological solution. But there are, it seems, many issues upon which a fruitful co- operation between the two is feasible. The ideal of educational psychology is, by the introduction of appliances, by the careful arrange- ment of tests, and by systematic records of conditions and results, to build up reliable evidence on peda- gogical matters. This evidence should include (a) a systematic account of mental processes during the successive years of the individual lifetime, the com- plete histories of the different capacities — the careers, so to speak, of the several instincts and emotions and the vicissitudes of memory, imagination, and reason- ing. This is to study psychology in all dimensions, instead of in " cross-sections " of a few adult years, (b) Educational psychology must also designate and analyze the mental processes which are called into action by the branches taught in the school curricu- lum, and by the other situations which are peculiar to school life. INTRODUCTION S The Meaning of a Course of Study. — Many students feel that the more " solid fact " they can absorb in a course of study the greater its value to them. This would be true if they understood all that went into the making of those facts, and if they could be trusted afterwards to apply them, or to re- shape them under criticism. But too often the man who wants merely results cannot use them because he does not know their meaning. Every subject of study which really commands human interest has more problems to deal with than it has solutions to offer, and since the problems are its reason for being, it is the first business of the student to appreciate their import. Without this the most convincing results or the greatest array of evidence is devoid of interest. Evidence, even when gained through one's own ex- perimentation, has little significance for us until we know upon what issue it is directed. After a knowl- edge of problems comes a study of methods. There is not only an historical and cultural interest in repeating the classical experiments in a given field, but the student may feel that he is also, in a modest way, making a scientific contribution, because every careful verification of a principle adds to our cer- tainty of it. Moreover, the student who has greatest familiarity with old methods is the more likely to invent new ones. In the third place, the student should have some acquaintance with the typical re- 4 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY suits which these methods have secured and the uses to which they can be put. A course of study should aim, therefore, to give three things : 1. An intelligent appreciation of the chief problems in the field ; 2. Training in the extant methods of solving them, and encouragement in the origination of new methods; and 3. An equipment of facts and their practical bearings. An understanding of the most general educational problems involves some discussion of the theory of the school, since this is the social institution which handles these questions. The Theory of the School. — The school is a medi- ating agency between the child on the one hand, and the work of the world on the other. Its most general aim is the cultivation of character and the training for vocation. The character or cultural ideal in edu- cation, which is expressed as the production of a balanced, well-rounded personality, we inherit in part from the Greeks, but also from Eousseau,^ who said : " In the natural order of things, all men being equal, their common vocation is manhood, and who- ever is well trained for that cannot fulfil badly any vocation connected with it. ^Yhether my pupil be destined for the army, the church, or the bar con- cerns me but little. Eegardless of the vocation of ^ The numbers refer to list of references to be found at the end of the book. INTRODUCTION 5 his parents, nature summons him to the duties of human life. To live is the trade I wish to teach him." The vocational ideal, on the other hand, is the making of the useful citizen, the producer of good works, the master craftsman. It emphasizes effi- ciency and professionalism, ^ow, character and vo- cation are correlative conceptions. There is no such thing as character without vocation if we take voca- tion in the large sense of the systematic effort at specific results. A man's vocation is the external and particular pattern of his life, his character is his internal and general reaction to life. Vocations are the great objective, social types of human be- havior, and they tend to give that unity and stability to man's impulses which we call character. The mat- ter may be summed up also as follows. Any kind of training, or any force or circumstance which gives " balance," " proportion," or " unity " to a person's life, whatever makes it significant or " character- istic," is educative. Whatever introduces " order " into life educates, nothing else does. Dewey ^ writes : " Now the school, for psychologi- cal purposes, stands in many respects midway be- tween the extreme simplifications of the laboratory and the confused complexities of ordinary life. Its conditions are those of life at large; they are social and practical. But it approaches the laboratory in so far as the ends aimed at are reduced in number. 6 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY are definite, and thus simplify the conditions; and their psychological phase is uppermost, while in ordinary life these are secondary and swallowed up." Let us follow out this comparison of school condi- tions to daily occupations on the one hand, and to laboratory procedure on the other. The School Represents Society to the Child. — The school stands in symbolic relations and is for the child an epitome and abstract of his future world. The curriculum is derived from occupations. Read- ing, writing, and arithmetic were all vocational in their origins and are now common elements in so many occupations that they are a necessary part of almost all schooling. With the division of labor the types of vocations have become so numerous that it is not possible for the school to give specific prac- tice in them all, hence it is constrained to choose the most important common elements, and to try to hit upon a series of exercises which shall be as repre- sentative as possible of the mental and physical requirements of the greatest number of important callings. Hence the first question to be asked of any school exercise is. Does it represent, psychologically, any real situation which the child will hereafter meet. The School as a Laboratory. — A second function of the school is that of analyzing and interpreting the child to society. The teacher, because of his INTRODUCTION 7 daily contact with children, is in a position to gather observations on them as no one else can. Teaching children is only a part of his business, learning some- thing about them and putting this into communicable form is another part. In the ideal school, teaching hours would be shortened in order to permit the teacher to do scientific as well as practical work. In- deed, the gathering of scientific data upon children, and upon the methods of dealing with them, is quite as important a function as is the business of actual instruction. What is an Experiment? — Briefly, it is " observa- tion under controlled conditions." Since educational psychology is turning more and more to experimental evidence we may pause a bit to think over what we mean by an experiment. Wundt ^ has formulated four rules for experimentation as follows: 1. The observer must be ready for the event to take place. 2. The observer must, as far as possible, apprehend, and follow the course of events with concentrated attention. 3. Every observation, in order to give assured results, must be capable of being repeated several times under the same circumstances. 4. The conditions under which the process of conscious- ness occurs must be controlled in such a way that we can sometimes shut out a given element in the situation, and sometimes gradually alter it in strength or quality. Not all experiences can be subjected to this full procedure. We cannot " kindle when we will " com- 8 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY plex emotional excitement, nor can we command in our subjects repeated instances of creative thinking under the same circumstances, l^evertheless, it is important to keep in mind as a goal the ideally com- plete experiment. An experiment is an abstraction from life in that it chooses a certain experience and limits it to un- usually constant conditions. By a series of such simplifications the experience is analyzed. For ex- ample, we know that when we are lifting heavy weights the difference of a few grams is not noticed, whereas the few grams are easily perceived when they are added to a light weight. But not until we have abstracted from the accidental sizes and shapes of our weights, and have run through a graduated series of them, do we know this fact in the exact terms of Weber's law. Another example : it is a casual observation that children memorize more rapidly than do adults ; but, if we abstract from the varying interests and habits of children and adults, and set them down to the same task under the same external conditions, and under similar degrees of pressure to accomplish the task, we shall, in all prob- ability, find that our casual observation was false or misleading. One more example : imagine a person looking at the sun and then noticing that wherever he afterwards turns his eyes there is a bright spot. If he becomes curious about this spot, he will sim- INTRODUCTION 9 plify his experience by throwing this after-image upon a gray screen instead of resting it upon any background that chances to be present. If his curi- osity persists he will get other after-images and throw them upon other screens of different but known brightnesses, and for specific periods of time. It will then happen that regularities appear in the after- image which are imperceptible under ordinary con- ditions. By such abstractions, therefore, we may sometimes confirm and refine upon casual observa- tion, sometimes correct it or reverse it, and some- times find new facts which are not attainable at all by casual observation. What is a Measurement? — A measurement is always the application of some old or standard experi- ence to a new or hitherto unanalyzed one. The ob- ject to be measured is translated or resolved into terms of the old. All standards are arbitrarily fixed by social conventions, though most of them have been suggested by natural objects or events which seem apt for the purpose. At first only rough and ready estimates were used. A distance might be told as so many days' journey, or an object as so many hands high. In Tahiti, it is said,^ time was not measured in hours, nor the intervals of the day numbered, but they were quaintl.y named in some descriptive way. For a very early hour they said, " When a man's face can be seen," and then came, " When 10 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY the flies begin to stir," and " When the rays of the sun are level over the land." Eventually men grow precise and develop standards which are capable of ever finer gradations. Extensive magnitudes and the events of the physi- cal world can be measured by the units of time, space, and mass. Some physical measurements are made in other terms : thus Venn ^^ cites the instance of the boiling-point of water as a natural standard or point of reference, though it is not a unit. With mental phenomena the case is somewhat different, although here, too, the event may be said to be measured when its physical effect is registered and measured. One type of measurement, then, in psy- chology is constituted by the changes which are recorded by physical instruments. Examples are the deflection of a galvanic current by emotional excite- ment, and the increased pressure on a dynamometer due to voluntary exertion. Another type of measure- ment is constituted by the comparison of a given men- tal performance with a group of other mental per- formances of the same kind. Types or norms of various sorts can be determined, and any new in- stance can be expressed in degrees of approximation to the type. This is similar, also, to evaluating a thing by reference to its position in a series. When we say that a student is fifth in a series of twenty we have made a beginning of measurement. Eela- INTRODUCTION 11 tive position in a series is not at bottom a different kind of measurement from that by physical units : it is a less developed stage of the same process. The problem of educational psychology, so far as measurement is concerned, is to discover and to develop norms for a great variety of mental per- formances. Typical school activities must be selected, and these tried upon children of different ages. Standard achievements for the several grades can thus be secured, and upon these the teacher can base a reasonable expectation as to the children under him. It is entirely fair to ask from experimental pedagogy the answer to questions like these : " About how long should it take a child of ten to learn by heart Words- worth's ' Daffodils ' ? " and " Which is harder for a boy of twelve, to add fractions or to prove simple geometrical theorems ? " Scales for the estimation of handwriting, of drawing, and of English com- position, etc., have already been constructed, and give promise of great utility. The conception of a general intelligence scale expressed in terms of mental age has been profoundly stimulating, and will be the lever for dislodging a mass of pedagogical tradition. Some of the uses of such a scale will be indicated later. Some Current Fallacies About Teaching, — There are several popular impressions about the business of teaching which the student of pedagogy must examine for himself. Let us turn in particular to these three: 12 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 1. Teachers are born, not made. 2. Teaching is learned bj experience rather than by theory. 3. There is no such thing as "• the normal child." 1. If teachers are born and not made, they re- semble in this respect every other human being. That is to say, every man is born with certain caj^acities, and if he follows a vocation which is congenial to them he is a " born lawyer," a " born carpenter," or a " born teacher," as the case may be. It is obviously desirable that every one, whether teacher or not, should practise the calling for which he is by nature fitted. But natural capacity alone will never insure skill, and where the teaching instinct does exist, it must, like every other instinct, express itself in specific habits which are capable of modification for good or for ill. The teacher, therefore, however " born " he be, cannot afford to neglect these chances of modification. He needs both training and instruc- tion. 2. It is true that, without experience, insight into teaching is incomplete, but it is by no means true that experience by itself can make a good teacher. Experience alone teaches nothing. Only the mind which interrogates, analyzes, and systematizes its ex- periences learns anything from them. We can make experience teach us something, but we cannot rely upon it to do so while we sit down in the shade. 3. " The ' normal ' child does not exist." Modern INTRODUCTION 13 schoolmen rightly insist that any single child is an individual rather than a normal child, and that when all that we know about " children " has been said, there still remains the problem of finding out whether any of it is true for the particular specimen in ques- tion. This important truth has impressed some writ- ers to such a degree that they quite fail to see any validity in " the child." Thus Davenport '^ says : '' The child-mind is a pure abstraction. Actually, we have the minds of various children which are, in the extreme, so unlike that they have few features in common . . . ' the normal ' is itself a scholastic and pedantic figure of speech and does not, strictly speak- ing, correspond with anything found in nature." Such remarks have a value as a warning against the wrong use of abstractions. But to deny that norms have any validity, and to suppose that the conception of " the child " performs no service to pedagogy, is to deny the possibility of general laws. These ab- stractions most emphatically are not " found in nature," they are made by hard toil, and are the means by which man understands and controls nature. It is only through generalizations that one man can pass on to others his experiences. If, therefore, there were really no " features in common " among indi- vidual children, then it would be impossible to dis- tinguish " the child " from " the adult," and impos- sible for one teacher to learn from another or to learn 14 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY from his own past experience with children. To some minds it may seem intolerably vague and futile to say that we have several kinds of treatment which will fit " the child " only we do not know which of the lot to use in any particular case. As well not know at all. But the situation is like that of the man who was sent to unlock a door and was given a bunch of keys to do it with. He did not know which was the right key, so he left them all behind. Peda- gogy can put into the teacher's hand a bunch of keys, but it cannot anticipate the exact moment at which each one is to be used. CHAPTER II THE GROWTH OF HUMAN STRUCTURE General Curves of Growth. — As a preliminary to the study of growth proper, it is appropriate to gain some idea of the percentage of all persons born which survives at each stage of human life. The follow- ing statement is taken from Rapeer : ^ " 1. One-fifth of all the children born each year in this country die before they are a year old, approxi- mately a half-million. ... 2." Half of the persons born in our country die before they are twenty-three years of age, and about half of these before the age of five. ... 3. The average age of persons dying is gradually rising, but is still below the age of forty — near thirty-eight." The curve in Fig. 1, also from Rapeer, shows the number of persons dying per 1,000 of population at different ages. These are statistics for ten states. A large part of infant mortality is known to be due to preventable causes, hence the first phase of this curve probably records a social fact (i.e., deaths due to neglect or ignorance) as well as a physi- ological one. Yet when we compare this mortality curve with the curves of growth given below, the idea 15 16 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY is suggested that in this early period the rapid and profound changes which occur in the organism leave it less resistant to disease. In later phases of growth there is conflicting evidence as to the connection be- tween rapid growth and liability to disease. The most apparent of the gross differences in struc- 1 r 160 ^ / / 130 / 120 / y 100 / 90 ' 80 , 60 i / .40 / / 20 V ^ y 10 6 \ "^-' ^■ "? cr> 3 Ol S 25 34 35 -44 45 54 56 ■64 65- 74 74 a nd over s s ^ YEARS Fig. 1. turc between the child and the adult are those of height and weight. Keference to the accompanying figure from Roberts ^ and the tables of Boas ^ brings out certain important points. There are periods of accelerated, and others of retarded, growth. The first year of life is that of most rapid change: the child, GROWTH OF HUMAN STRUCTURE 17 at the end of his first year, has gained about thirty- three per cent, in height and about two hundred per cent, in weight, a rate of increase which he will never reach again. There is a time of quickened growth also between the sixth and eighth years, then a slow- ing of the rate till about the age of ten for girls, and twelve for boys, when the prepubertal accelera- tion begins. 6 1( YEARS 15 20 25304055 X y / ----- 50 40 80 y -: / / , I // II < 1 1 # // // 20 X 10 ft / \ Women - Fig. 2. 18 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY TABLE I Average American Height Mathematically calculated by Dr. Franz Boas from the data of 45,151 boys and 43,298 girls in the cities of Boston, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Worcester, Toronto, and Oakland (Cal.) ; also the absolute and the per- centage annual increase of same. , Boys GlrlB- . gas .2 a, H be 22 og s « ■s > as ^ o a «•- V 03 C B = S a, Z 5 E ii w o o »- a "I §9 O 01 <1S 4> ^ s v Z « a c " ■ a m v ^ ^- V \ \ ^, -> \ ^ \1 \ \ \ \ ^^ \ \ N \ \ \1 V ^ \, \ A \ \ \ \ \ \ \ V l A \ \\ \ \ \ \ \ \\ \ \ \ \ \\ \^ V \ i \ \ \ \ \\ \ \ o ' \\ \ V \ \ w \ 1 \ \ \ \ w \ \\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ y \\ \ \ \\ \ \ M \ \ V A M \ \ \ \ \ \ \ ' i \ 1 ^ 10 10 9)^ 9 9 8)^ 8]4 Btal. Andress "^ found, from records of a group of forty- nine students, that those whose average age was be- tween eighteen and nineteen years slept, on the aver- age, eight hcurs and fifty-three minutes, those 38 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY between twenty and twenty-one years old slept, on the average, eight hours and thirty-four minutes. There seem to be wide individual variations in the amount of sleep needed whether by adults or children. The quality or depth of sleep has been studied in the following way: The experimenter, Kohlsehlit- 0123 456 789 10 U HOURS Fig. 5. ter,^° dropped a ball from varying heights upon a metal plate, and in this way determined how loud a sound was necessary to waken a sleeping subject. This was tried for the different hours of the subject's sleep period. Fig. 5 shows the height in centimeters (on the ordinate) which the ball had to fall in order to waken the sleeper after a certain number of hours GROWTH OF BEHAVIOR. INSTINCT 39 of sleep (as shown on the abscissa). The general form of this curve has been verified by other investi- gators for auditory, tactile, and electric stimuli. It indicates that sleep attains its maximum depth at the end of an hour, or an hour and a half, and that it becomes progressively lighter for the later hours. An important suggestion is made by Seashore ^^^ in view of this fact. He writes : " From this we may derive a principle of mental economy. Cut short the long light sleep of the late morning hours and substitute a short sleep at some favorable time during the work day. . . . The curve of day sleep has the same form as the curve of night sleep, but is usually very much smaller. From ten to twenty minutes would cover the period of deepest sleep in the day rest of a normal brain worker." How far is sleep subject to voluntary control? '■ Some persons are able to sleep at will and to wake at will, and it is probable that the average person could, by practice, make some progress in that direction. It appears also to be possible to shorten arbitrarily the amount of sleep needed upon occasion. There is evi- dence to show that after a long time of sleeplessness a few hours of profound slumber may do the work of a longer and lighter sleep. But on the other hand there is danger of cutting off needed rest, especially with children. According to Pieron ^^ those animals which have the most complex and differentiated 40 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY mechanism of adaptation are the ones in which the periods of rest attain a duration and depth unknown in the simpler organisms. Manaceine ^^ points out that the part of the organism which is most affected by sleep is the nervous system, and chiefly the brain. " It is possible," she writes, " for all the organs of the body to be active during sleep, with the exception of the nervous system, and even this exception is not constant . . . the spinal cord and the different sen- sory nerves do not sleep." Sleep, then, appears to be peculiar to the higher rather than the lower ani- mal forms, and to the higher rather than the lower parts of these. In other words, well-defined sleep periods are a mark of complex organization. The practice of modern open-air schools in pro- viding for a midday nap for children is well advised, and it might with advantage be copied by other schools as well. Dreams. — The interesting idea is proposed by Ellis ^* that dreaming is the primitive form of con- sciousness. Whether this be true or not, dreams are certainly a very characteristic aspect of behavior dur- ing sleep. What significance, we may ask, has dream life in our present state of evolution ? Can it teach us anything about children ? Is it desirable in itself ? Can it be cultivated or suppressed ? We cannot give dogmatic answers to all of these questions, but recent researches give a start on some of them. GROWTH OF BEHAVIOR. INSTINCT 41 Manaccinc believes that the absence of dreams is not a good sign, but that profuse dreaming is a nor- mal index of an advanced and active intelligence. It is probable that persons who are accustomed to saying that they seldom or never dream would be surprised at the frequency of their dreams if they would take the trouble to record them immediately after waking. An hour of waking life will often dispel not only the dream but even the knowledge that one has had a dream at all. I asked a group of twenty-four young women to give an estimate of the number of nights per month during which they had dreams. The aver- age estimate was 7.5. They then kept a daily record of their dreams for one month, with the result that the average number of nights on which dreams oc- curred proved to be 15.4. It is said that most dreams occur during the later hours of the sleep period, and hence during light sleep rather than deep sleep. This point was confirmed in the records just quoted. The content of dreams often repeats in part the business of the day just past, but it is also true that dreams very frequently jump over recent events and revive incidents of the remote past, or scenes which are remote from the interests of the dreamer. This fact has suggested the theory held, for example, by de Sanctis, that dreams are a recuperative phenomenon, that is, that dreams are a contrast eifect, like the after- image in vision, and show that the unused tracts in 42 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY the brain are functioning during sleep while the fatigued areas are resting. Freud's ^^ theory of dreams emphasizes their diag- nostic value. He regards them as a result of, hence a symptom of, ungratified wishes. " The dreams of little children are simple fulfilments of wishes." With adults he assumes as the cause of dreams, " Two psychic forces (streams, systems) , of which one con- stitutes the wish expressed by the dream, while the other acts as a censor upon this dream wish, and by means of this censoring forces a distortion of its ex- pression." Most of these dream wishes, Freud thinks, have a sexual reference. However this may be, the general contention is well-founded, that the emotions are the greatest determining forces in dream life. The life of dreams may be described as by Ellis as one in which emotion, imagination, and memory are active, often exceptionally so, but in which atten- tion, volition, and critical acumen are lowered. The dreamer may be fertile and creative, but is less often consistent or judicious. Similarities have been noticed between the psy- chical processes of children and of the dreamer. It is of some practical consequence to the teacher to know that for the child tlicre is no such clear-cut difference between his dreaming and his waking visions as the adult knows. Even for the adult, dreams have the same sensorv texture as ordinarv images, but the GROWTH OF BEHAVIOR. INSTINCT 43 adult has taught himself that events which cannot be fitted into the meager dimensions of the probable are not to be trusted as real, — they are dreams. The child has no basis for such a critical appraisal, and to him, therefore, all events have an equal claim to seem true. Tylor ^'^^ says that savages ofttimes show the same confusion between the subjective and objec- tive elements of their experience, and that the dreams and visions of the seer have the same kind of reality for him and his followers which any external event has. Instead, therefore, of reproving a child for this confusion, as if it showed a lying spirit in him, the teacher ought to help him to find tests for dis- tinguishing the imaginary from the real. Variations in Waking Efficiency. Work and Fatigue. — As we have seen, it is not until the fourth year of life that the child's waking periods over- balance in duration his sleep periods. Within these hours of waking activity there are marked changes in efficiency. For example, people in general fall into two great groups, morning workers and evening workers. The one group is capable of doing better work in the morning hours and diminishes in capacity during the remainder of the day; the other group gradually approaches its optimal period as the day wears on and is able to do its best work in the evening. Both are normal. Analogous differences appear for shorter intervals of time while the subject is engaged 44 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY upon some continuous task. Curves of work, or of fatigue, show that some persons reach their maximum soon after beginning the task and then gradually de- crease in efficiency. Others gradually improve from a poor beginning and only come to their maximum after a rather long period. Still others show first a rise, then a fall, i.e., they are intermediate in type between the other two. Reliable tests of fatigue are very much needed in school work. Many methods of measuring fatigue have been tried, but none seems to be entirely ade- quate. Among the objective tests are those which take account of the amount and quality of work done in some prescribed task, such as copying letters, strik- ing out letters, arithmetical computation, and memo- rizing. Records from the esthcsiometer and the dy- namometer have also been used, upon the assumption that mental fatigue lowers muscular power and raises the threshold of skin sensitivity. The reliability of these measures has been seriously questioned. The subjective feeling of weariness offers a rough sort of control, but, as Thorndike ^^' has shown, this is far from a sure guide. Children often feel weary when they are not fatigued, and fail to feel fatigue when it is really there. In the same way genuine fatigue may fail to show in the quality of work done. For practical purposes the teacher must make a diagnosis of fatigue on the basis of some combination of signs GROWTH OF BEHAVIOR. INSTINCT 45 such as physical appearance, the child's own state- ment, the quality of work done, and the knowledge of the length of time the child has been working. The arrangement of the school program should be such as to take account of the fatigue factor. Thus, the half-hour class period is adopted by some good schools and a five- or ten-minute free interval allowed between exercises. Subjects may be so scheduled that the fatigue effects are diminished. Some studies are more taxing than others, mathematics and foreign languages are usually conceded to be " harder " than drawing and literature; though, obviously, the teacher and the method make large differences in this respect. The difficult subjects should come early in the day. Vigorous gymnastic w^ork also induces men- tal fatigue, and hence belongs at the end rather than at the beginning of a school day. Light gymnastic exercises of a few minutes' duration may have a stimulative effect, and may properly be introduced at an early period of the day. In the alternation of sleep and waking, in the phenomena of dream consciousness, and in the fluctua- tions of work and fatigue during waking conscious- ness we have been discussing very general aspects of mind. In the next chapter we come to a discussion of a few of the more specialized instinctive responses, namely, fear, the collecting impulse, and play. CHAPTEE IV INSTINCT, CONTINUED Instinct and Emotion. — In the case of dream con- sciousness we said that emotions are the great motifs. They are scarcely less so in waking life. All in- stinctive acts, unless they have become specialized into smoothly running habits, are accompanied by emotion. Macdougall's list, cited above, illustrates the fact that for every well-defined instinctive reac- tion we can find a recognized emotional attitude. The relation of emotion to instinct is the relation of a conscious feeling, or inner experience of an act, to the act itself. An instinctive act is an overt jDhysiological event, the emotion is the psychical side of this event. Instincts are typical ways of acting, and emotions are typical attitudes corresponding to these acts. In connection with special phases of the child's growth we shall have occasion to advert to various instincts, such as imitation in learning, vocalization in the acquisition of language, constructiveness in rea- soning, etc. The present discussion will be limited, therefore, to a consideration of three tendencies which are especially significant for the teacher, and which 46 INSTINCT, CONTINUED 47 have been studied iu some detail. These are the instinct of fear, the collecting impulse, and play. Fear. — Fear has been called by Stanley the most primitive kind of emotion, and it is undoubtedly an early and a lasting form. In a study of emotion by Calkins and Fackenthal ^^ the fears of children are commented upon as follows : " The noticeable fea- ture ... is the increase of fear with added years. Two-fifths of the children under three years and one-tenth of the children under six, but less than one- hundredth of the older children, are reported as hav- ing no fear. The supposed prominence of fear among girls is certainly not shown by the younger children." Hall ^^^ also Avrites on the basis of very large ques- tionnaire returns : " The fears of the boys increase from seven to nine, and then decline, while those of the girls increase more steadily from four to eight- een." Hall tabulates a large number of the special objects of fear, with a wealth of illustration under each. The fears which lead in frequency are: the fear of thunder and lightning, of reptiles, of strange persons, of darkness, and of fire. Among other less frequent fears are the dread of death, of solitude, of eyes, of fur, and of teeth. Some children cannot bear to see people show their back teeth. It is curi- ous to note, in this connection, that one of the old rules of Japanese etiquette expressly forbade persons of inferior rank to smile in such a manner that their 48 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY back teeth could be seen. Hall continues : " While many special fears decline and others increase with age, many infantile fears remain through life, and scores of our reporters say there has been no change in their fears." Binet ^^"^ has compared, on the basis of class rank, different groups of school children who were reported as specially subject to fear. He found that there is no correlation, either positive or nega- tive, between timidity and intelligence, but that the more timid children are those who have more vivid imagination. Fear, in pedagogical practice, has probably been the most exploited of the instincts. The history of education indicates that in most school systems it has been the teacher's chief resource for stimulating in- terest in work. Deplorable as this is, it but marks the extreme use of that which is, after all, a legiti- mate educative means. It is neither possible nor desirable to eradicate entirely the reactions of fear. But it is possible to transmute them by altering gradually the objects to which they are attached. Hall says : " We fear God better for having feared thunder." Education may be conceived of as the reorganization of the objects of emotion; the un- reasonable fears of childhood may be changed to reasonable habits of discretion, and the fear of physical harm made over into the fear of that which is spiritually ignoble. INSTINCT, CONTINUED 49 There is an extreme form of the fear reaction which is probably harmful to the organism, namely, the abject terror which results in paralysis of effort and in great nervous shock, but moderate degrees of fear are sometimes a necessary spur to action. Cannon,*" writing upon the energizing influence of emotional excitement, says : " Every one of the visceral changes that have been noted — the cessation of processes in the alimentary canal (thus freeing the energy supply for other parts) ; the shifting of blood from the ab- dominal organs, whose activities are deferable, to the organs immediately essential to muscular exer- tion (the lungs, the heart, the central nervous sys- tem) ; the increased vigor of contraction of the heart ; the quick abolition of the effects of muscular fatigue ; the mobilizing of energy-giving sugar in the circula- tion — every one of these visceral changes is directly serviceable in fnaking the organism more effective in the violent display of energy luhich fear or rage or pain may involve." In brief, fear appears early in the child's history, and some forms of it decline while others increase with years. Moderate fear is stimulating. The teacher should try, not to eliminate, but to trans- form and use this power. The Collecting Impulse. — The assembling of great numbers of any given kind of thing is a practice which psychologists treat as instinctive. Caroline 50 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Burk,^^ who got records from 607 boys and as many girls, writes upon this point : ^' When we consider its universality (only 3 per cent, of the boys and 1 per cent, of the girls questioned said they had never ma:de collections), its widespread affection ... its intensity, the number of collections children make and the interest children take in them, . . . the variety of things collected, showing that the mania TABLE VI Age Av. per boy Av . per girl Av. per c 6 1.2 1.9 1.5 7 2.1 2.6 2.3 8 3.5 4.5 4.0 9 3.9 4.1 4.0 10 4.4 4.4 4.4 11 3.4 3.3 3.3 12 3.0 3.0 3.0 13 3.5 3.4 3.4 14 3.0 3.0 3.0 15 2.7 3.2 2.9 16 2.1 3.3 2.7 17 2.0 3.0 2.5 seizes upon any and practically every outlet imagi- nable, and showing, too,' that to collect is more im- portant than what is collected, when we consider, moreover, that the phenomenon has a definite prog- ress, — a rise, a growth and a decline, an age- development, — we are inclined not to hesitate in calling it an instinct." The impulse appears at least as early as the third year, but it then increases in INSTINCT, CONTINUED 51 importance until its climax at the age of about ten. The number of active collections (collections then in progress) which she reports per child for the different years are shown in Table VI. There is the greatest range and variety in the sorts of objects gathered, though some kinds are fairly definitely related to certain age periods. Burk found three chief stages in the history of this instinct; in the first, Avhich lasts till about the eighth year, chil- dren gather their possessions in a haphazard fashion, choosing the things which are easiest to get. The second period, which falls between the ages of eight and eleven or twelve, is the time in which the largest number of collections is made, and in which the size or quantity of each is greatest. The child keeps get- ting more and more of the same kind. In this period the " nature-interest " is at its height ; the child collects stones, shells, mosses, flow^ers, butterflies, and birds' eggs. The third or adolescent period, from twelve years on, sees the lessening of this naturalist interest and the increase of a more humanistic one. If the instinct is undirected at this time, Burk says, it is likely " to dribble off into sentimental lines, as in the collection of party-souvenirs, theatre-programs, etc., and into social fads, as in the collection of spoons, hatpins, etc." If, on the contrary, some en- couragement is given to the child's scientific impulse, he may persist in and develop his nature-interests, 52 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY and he is likely, in that case, in the adolescent period, to pay more attention to classifying, arranging, and analyzing his collections. Pedagogically, this impulse to collect is of great value. It is the soundest basis for inductive work in nature-study. It makes itself felt in other sub- jects, as in history or geography, where collections of foreign stamps have given children an interest in studying the countries which issue them. Best of all, however, it is the foundation of that mental habit of gathering evidence which is the foundation of science, and which is essential to the logical grasp of any sub- ject whatsoever. Play. — In classifying play among the instincts, one finds the difficulty (the same that appears in the case of imitation) that play takes so many shapes, simu- lates such varied activities, that it is hard to asso- ciate it with any definite group of reflexes. It is, nevertheless, a spontaneous, unlearned tendency, and one which is persistent and universal. Much has been written, both of a descriptive and of a theoretical nature, concerning play, and our object will be to enumerate the salient points in these descriptions and theories, and to see whether from among them we can arrive at some common understanding of the nature of play. 1. Play is the result and expression of " surplus energy" in the organism (Schiller, Spencer). ITow, INSTINCT, CONTINUED 53 while it is clear that play may be begun where there is no such surplus energy, and often is kept up to the point of great fatigue, yet the phrase does express a fact, namely, that play is, in general, connected with leisure, and is in a sense a secondary, or by-product phenomenon. 2. Play is activity which is pleasurable in itself, as distinguished from work, which is pleasurable only in its results. Play, therefore, is spontaneous, whereas work is imposed by some desired end. This theory, again, has obvious exceptions, and yet is truly descriptive of many cases. 3. Attention is differently directed in play and in work; in play attention is occupied either with the process, or else with some end which is assumed to be important merely for the sake of the play, as put- ting a ball over a goal, whereas in work some end actually wished for in itself is the object of endeavor. 4. The likeness of play to artistic creation is sometimes pointed out. Hirn*" speaks of this, but he also shows that a permanent objective product is a criterion which distinguishes art from play. 5. Groos *^ has classified plays according to the various aspects of mental life which they involve. There is, thus, play which involves experimentation with the senses, there is the exercise of muscular power, or gymnastic play, also plays which simulate instinctive and emotional responses, such as fighting, 54 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY flight, and love; then plays which imitate external objects and events, thereby calling upon the under- standing, and plays which are tests of ingenuity and judgment. Other writers have enumerated many of the things played with by children. There is noth- ing, one may say, which has not at some time formed the theme of some play. It follows from this that we cannot distinguish play from work by the kind of act performed, because what one person does " for fun " another may do for earnest. We cannot dis- regard the intention. The points thus far mentioned relate to the content or structural part of play, and to the personal feel- ings of the player. It is necessary to turn also to some of the opinions which have been held upon the function or purpose of play in the economy of the organism. 6. Froebel and his students noticed the mimicry in children's plays, how they reproduced the dealings of the adult world. They began to think of these plays as something symbolic, and said that they were " pattern experiences." They planned to have chil- dren play out a systematic series of games which were to give them a premonitory taste of all the im- portant experiences of the race. 7. Groos, in a somewhat similar vein, developed his theory that play is a preparatory exercise for future serious undertakings. INSTINCT, CONTINUED , 55 8. Hall, on tbe contrary, suggests that play may be atavistic, — it may be one of those vestigial parts of human behavior which are destined eventually to disappear. It is the view of the present writer that most of the above theories and comments can be unified by the conception of play as a spontaneous drill, or rehearsal, or exercise of mastery. Play appears to be a sec- ondary rather than a primary phase of activity; it is essentially reiterative. It is " free " and '' pleas- urable " just because it represents a kind of mastery already attained. A child who has caught a new trick, or learned a new bit of skill, exults in admira- tion of himself, and cordially invites the whole world to " just see me do this." We are all like that; for as soon as we have gained control of a new process we want to try it over and over, to do it this way and that, to feel and exhibit our power over it. We want, in a word, to play with it. We cannot play at any- thing until we have first worked at it. When a child learns a '' piece " on the piano he finds that the first stages are hard work, but once the combinations be- come somewhat familiar, he gives himself up to unbridled repetition. It is not chiefly the music which he enjoys, he could not stand it to have any- body else play the same thing so often, it is the en- joyment of his own skill. Play is the exploitation of technique. Such a view accounts for the gen- 56 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY ■erally pleasurable quality of play, and for its " sur- plus " character, inasmuch as it shows play to be the exercise or verification of conscious power. This view agrees with the fact that in play attention is more concerned with the process than with any ex- ternal product ; it recognizes the imitative nature of play because it regards play as the practice, drill, or repetition of some act already performed ; and, finally, it is consistent with the theory that play has a func- tion as a preparatory exercise for future activity. It differs from that theory only so far as to maintain that play is not anticipatory, i. e., is not the initial state of any act, but is a practice stage in which we become familiar with the new idea and confirm our hold upon it. Play as a teaching device has been utilized from the days of the Egyptians to the present. The Greeks and Eomans, as Plato and Quintilian attest, knew its convenience. But the psychological analysis of play and the full recognition of its pedagogical impor- tance are modern. Play has now become an estab- lished method which has a contribution to offer to practically every subject in the curriculum. It is a matter of some interest to know whether the particular form of play theory which the teacher adopts will make any difference in his use of the play method. This much it is safe to assume from the preceding discussion, namely, that play does not re- INSTINCT, CONTINUED 57 quire a set of activities disparate in content from the serious business of the school. It is not necessary for the teacher to import into the schoolroom one set of materials for play and another set for work. Many of the ordinary school exercises can be transformed into play by the simplest suggestions, such as taking sides, holding hands in a circle, or being timed by a stop-watch. Pleasure in skill for its own sake and a genuine impulse to practise seem to be normally present in the average child. Games merely give a varied background for the exercise of skill, and per- haps add the competitive element. Furthermore, if our previous analysis is correct, play is not the right medium for the first introduction of a new topic. If play depends upon a certain ease, or mastery already attained, then obviously we cannot play with an idea when we are just getting it. The acquisition of novel conceptions is too absorbing, the learning of new combinations of movements too hard, to be done in the play spirit. Play has an indispensable function in the school program in enlivening the drill exer- cises, but it ought by no means to dominate every school situation. CHAPTEE V THE GROWTH OF BEHAVIOR. MOTOR CAPACITIES Fundamental and Accessory. — A general distinc- tion of some practical importance in the kinds of movement which the child performs is the differ- ence between fundamental and accessory. Burk ** has popularized in pedagogic thought the three-level theory of neural activity proposed by Hughlings- Jackson. According to this theory the lower levels of the nervous system, viz., the cord, the medulla and the pons, are biologically older than the higher levels, and they control those movements which are acquired earlier both by the individual and the race. The higher levels, on the contrary, control the finer adjust- ments which are the latest to be acquired. Funda- mental movements involve the more massive muscles and larger joints, such as are concerned in the pos- tures of sitting, standing, holding up the head and lifting the arms, or in locomotion, as creeping, walk- ing, rolling, running, jumping, balancing, swimming. They pertain to the body as a whole, or to large di- visions of it. These movements have some similarity 58 MOTOR CAPACITIES 59 and comraimity of purpose with those of auimals. Tliey are said to be the last to disappear in case of paralysis or of the progressive degeneration of the motor powers. In contrast to all this, the accessory movements are those which are performed by the finer muscles and are controlled by the higher centers. They do not so obviously call the whole body into l)lay, but rather are confined to some part of it. Ex- amples are the movements of writing, sewing, finger- ing musical instruments, singing, and talking. These are the ones which are often imperfect or lacking in mental defectives, and which are the first to break down in mental disease. It is not true, of course, that all those movements which conduce to gross bodily control are perfected before any use of the accessory muscles begins. Indeed, the first begin- nings of vocalization and manipulation, as well as eye-movements and many small reflexes, appear long before the child. can walk. But it is true that the development of the vocal, manual, and ocular capaci- ties to anything like their characteristic delicacy comes much later than the larger control move- ments. Certain experiments made by Bryan ^^'^ on the rate of tapping with the finger, wrist, elbow, and shoulder show that the skill which each of these parts will have at maturity develops early for elbow and shoul- der, and late for wrist and finger. The tables are 60 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY here reproduced as condensed by Burk (op. cit.). The numbers are the arithmetical mean of the num- ber of taps per five-second interval. Thus the mean number of finger taps for a five-year-old boy is 19.6. TABLE VII BOYS Age 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Number 14 26 35 33 43 37 36 33 34 41 32 26 Finger 19.6 19.5 21.0 23.1 24.4 25.5 27.0 29.3 28.7 31.5 316 3:^9 Wrist 20.1 23.0 23.7 26.3 27.8 28 5 30 3 31.6 32.3 33.0 34.3 35.9 Elbow 22.7 23.5 24.2 26.1 28.2 28.1 29.3 29.9 31.0 32.7 31.5 32.7 Shoulder. ... 18.4 19.8 20.5 22.3 24.1 22.6 24.1 25.0 25.5 27.2 26.3 28.7 GIRLS Age 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Number 28 32 33 43 37 36 33 34 41 32 26 Finger 19.8 20.7 22.2 24.0 2,j.8 27.1 28.2 30.3 29.5 29.1 31.3 Wrist 21.6 a3.1 24.3 25.5 28.5 30.4 31.6 33.2 .30.3 30.9 33 3 Elbow 22.7 2S2 24.4 2.5.4 27.5 28 6 29.4 .30.5 28.8 29.3 .30.1 Shoulder 19.9 20.2 21.9 22.7 22.6 24.9 25.7 27.5 26.6 26 27.9 It also appears from experiments made by Han- cock *^ that the order of development of control is, — body, shoulder, arm, forearm, and hand. The im- portance of this distinction between fundamental and accessory in the planning of school work is apparent. That Avhich requires the close application of eyes and fingers should come later than the exercises which involve the larger uses of arms, legs, and body. Atavistic Movements. — Before turning to the growth of those motor responses with which educa- tion must reckon, it is in place to note that some of the young child's movements are destined to an early MOTOR CAPACITIES 61 elimination, quite aside from any interference with them on the part of his elders. There are, in other words, atavistic or vestigial motions which, like the vestigial organs, are reminiscent of earlier racial ex- perience. Robinson's oft-cited observations on the clinging power of very young infants is one illus- tration of the type. Children, when only an hour old, were able to support their own weight by hang- ing to a stick which they grasped in their hands. This power attained a maximum at the end of two or three weeks and then declined. The movements of a baby's hands and feet are more like the ape's movements than they are like those of the human adult. Swimming motions, made by some children when they are laid face down, have also been noted as probable survival movements. These facts suggest a line of criticism upon any pedagogical theory which insists upon '' the development of all the powers " with impartial emphasis. Some of our instincts may be already on the road to elimination, while others which seem inconspicuous now may be destined for a larger future. General Muscular Growth. — Of all the org-ans of the body the muscles show the most striking increase. The following table (Table VIII), of Quctelet's, quoted in HalP*^ shows something of the course of that growth between the years of ten and twenty-seven. It gives the lifting power in kilograms for men and 62 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY women. In this test, Hall says, the part played by the back, legs, hips, and arms is not dilferentiated. Hence it may be taken as a rough kind of general measure of growth in muscular capacity. It ap- TABLE VIII Annual Gain Age Men Women Men Worn* 10 45 31 11 48 35 3 4 12 52 39 4 4 13 63 43 11 4 14 71 47 8 4 15 80 51 9 4 16 95 57 15 6 17 110 63 15 6 18 118 67 8 4 19 125 71 7 4 20 132 74 7 3 21 138 76 6 2 22 143 78 5 2 23 147 80 4 2 25 153 82 6 2 27 154 83 1 1 pears, on this scale, that the greatest annual in- crease is at the age of sixteen and seventeen for both sexes. Women have, at every age, less absolute strength than men, and their relative strength de- creases with age. At the age of ten, women have sixty-eight per cent, of the strength of men, but at twenty-seven, they have only fifty-three per cent, of men's strength. MOTOR CAPACITIES 63 Some Special Motor Capacities. Walking. — A child's first attempts at locomotion of any kind arc preceded by a large amount of general arm and leg exercise. Usually creeping is learned before walk- ing, though not all children pass through the creeping stage. The age at which walking begins varies rather widely with individuals, and is occasionally preceded by the beginnings of speech. Mead *'' made a study of the age of walking and talking in relation to gen- eral intelligence with twenty-five boys and as many girls, all of them normal children. He reports that: " Boys begin to walk at 13.875 months, with a prob- able error of .97 month; and begin to talk at 16.5 months, with a probable error of 2.75 months. Girls begin to walk at 13.21 months, with a probable error of 1.12 months; and begin to talk at 15.5 months, with a probable error of 2.68 months." What part does instruction play in the art of walk- ing. I once heard a lady reproach her niece with ingratitude. " And I taught her to walk ! " she said. The implication was that the young lady would have found it pretty inconvenient to go through life with- out this accomplishment. This view of the matter is not infrequent, namely, that walking is a habit chiefly due to instruction. It is nearer the truth to say that walking is instinctive, and that it is bound to take place when the organism is ready for it, provided only that the customary stimuli, i.e., a floor to walk 64 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY on and a support to cling to for a time, are not abso- lutely withheld. The attempt to hasten the child before the natural moment or to delay him much beyond it is ill-advised and perhaps injurious. Chil- dren of school age can undoubtedly profit by cor- rection in their gait. There are, of course, various opinions as to what is correct walking. Military rules prescribe now one, now another type, such as the erect carriage, the goose-step, and the lope. Fashion indorses some gaits and taboos others. More- over, when the natural forms of locomotion are prac- tised as athletic events, walking, running, jumping, etc., each event develops its own technique, and there are many special points of form which the coach must teach. There are, however, certain common elements of good form which conduce to beaut}' and economy in ordinary walking, and these should be taught to children. To cultivate a narrow tread, to hold the feet in a straight line to the front, to keep the chest advanced, to balance on the ball of the foot, etc., all these need to be raised to level of conscious attention for the majority of children. It is at least as impor- tant that a child should have a good carriage as that he should write a legible hand. Breathing. — The respiration reflexes would seem to be even further removed from the need of tuition than the walking reflexes, and during the child's earliest years probably little can be done to modify MOTOR CAPACITIES 65 them. The breathing- of the infant, Preyer says, ib very irregular during the first weeks of life. The character of his son's breathing became predomi- nantly regular in the seventeenth month. The rate of breathing is said to be between thirty and fifty per minute in the new-born child, and between twenty-five and thirty-five during the first year. Adult breathing is, in comparison, slow and regular. A large vital or breathing capacity is one of the con- ditions of good health, and it is possible to increase this capacity by specific exercises. The normal in- crease of vital capacity due to age is indicated in Smedley's tables "" as ranging from 1,023 cubic centimeters for six-year-old boys, and 950 cc. for six- year-old girls, to 3,655 cc. and 2,343 cc. respectively for boys and girls of eighteen years. Boys and men have, at all ages, larger vital capacity than girls and women of the corresponding years. The years of most rapid gain for boys are from fifteen to seventeen, and for girls, from thirteen to fifteen. The necessity for teaching correct breathing has long been recognized by teachers of singing and pub- lic speaking, and the school is now realizing that here, too, is one of its duties. The practice of mouth- breathing must be watched for and checked. Where the physician finds this to be the result of adenoids, an operation must be recommended, but where it is merely a bad habit, the teacher must change it. Em- 66 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY phasis has recently been laid upon the relation o£ stammering to incorrect breathing, and the improve- ment of the breathing habit has been a means of effecting some cures for speech defect. The educational means for dealing with the funda- mental movements and reflexes which we have been discussing is the use of gymnastic exercises, sports, dancing, out-of-door work like gardening. These should hold first place in the curriculum for young children. Particularly interesting and promising is the role of the dance. Its rhythmic character and the unlimited variety of movements which it includes make it an adequate substitute for the ordinary set-up drill, while its artistic quality gives to the exercise an intellectual leaven which makes it a permanently interesting possession. Added to this is the historical meaning which attaches to the folk-dance. Dramatic enactment and the mimetic dance are the best pos- sible introduction and setting to the study of the his- tories and customs of other peoples. The dance is, therefore, a cultural agency which is at once physi- cal, intellectual, and esthetic. In its simpler forms it exercises only the more massive muscles and funda- mental co-ordinations. It is one of the best pedagogic assets for the discipline of young children. Hand Control. — Manual control is a phrase which stands for no single unitary act, but for a myriad of individual acts which make up one great realm MOTOR CAPACITIES 67 of those accessory movements which have been con- trasted with the fimdamentaL The complexities of man's manual achievements have often been com- pared with those of speech. It is said that we differ from the animals not less through the skill of the hands than through sjieech itself. The growth of this skill is a long and complex process. The first use of the hands in grasping and clinging is an undifferenti- ated use. According to the observations of the Gesells '^^ the hand movements are, for months, simultaneous, the child not being able to do different things at the same time with the two hands. Also the fingers move in parallel lines, not independently. These authors point out that idiots never overcome this simultaneity of hand movement, but that it be- gins to break up, with normal children, during the eighth month. Other writers speak of the " simian " method of handling objects as being characteristic of young children. Major ^° found that this persisted in his child until the end of the third year. The dis- covery of the separate use of the thumb, and its op- position to the fingers, is thus a fairly late bit of ])rogress. The strength of grip for children of different ages has been studied by the use of the dynamometer. Smedley (op. cif.) gives the following values in kilo- grams (Table IX). This table shows a steady in- 68 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY TABLE IX Boys Girls Age Rt. Hand Lt. Hand Rt. Hand Lt. Hand 6 9.21 8.48 8.36 7.74 7 10.74 10.11 9.88 9.24 8 12.41 11.67 11.16 10.48 9 14.34 13.47 12.77 11.97 10 16.52 15.59 14.65 13.72 11 18.85 17.72 16.54 15.52 12 21.24 19.71 18.92 17.78 13 24.44 22.51 21.84 20.39 14 28.42 26.22 24.79 22.92 15 33.39 30.88 27.00 24.92 16 39.37 36.39 28.70 26.56 17 44.74 40.96 29.56 27.43 18 49.28 45.01 29.75 27.66 crease for boys, wliich is most rapid from fourteen to eighteen, and an increase for girls wliicb is most rapid from eleven to fourteen. The girls are inferior in grip at all ages : at six they have 90 per cent, of the strength of boys for the right hand, 91 per cent, for the left hand, and at eighteen they have but 60 per cent, and 61 per cent, for the right and left hands respectively. There is some evidence, summarized in Whipple,'" to show that strength of grip correlates with intelligence. Bright children seem, on the whole, to excel dull ones in strength of grip, and men- tal defectives are deficient also in this measurement. One of the most striking facts of hand development is dextrality, or the superiority of one hand, usually the right, over the other. According to Baldwin ^' MOTOR CAPACITIES 69 the difference began to be apparent in his child as early as her ninth month. He noted the number of times the child would reach for a desired object with the right hand and with the left. When the object was equidistant from the two hands, she used to take both hands or either hand indifferently ; but in the ninth month, if the object were conveniently near, the child more frequently used the left hand ; whereas, if the object were further off and required an effort, she used the right. Thus the right hand became the preferred one for the difficult reaches, and the left for the more common task. Mrs. Woolley^^ repeated and confirmed Baldwin's observations, and found that her child's right hand came to be pre- ferred for the wider reaches as early as the seventh month. The ])roportion of left-handed persons to the whole community is commonly put at two per cent., though some believe that it would be much larger if all those could be counted in who were originally left-handed but had been compelled to cultivate the right. Bal- lard ^^^ indeed finds that about four per cent., among London school children, are pure sinistrals. The dis- advantages accruing to left-handed persons have been eloquently described by Gould. ^^ In the use of weapons, in fingering stringed instruments, in work- ing with surgical instruments or industrial tools, the left-handed are seriously inconvenienced. Our sys- 70 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY tern of penmanship is ill-suited to them, since its motions are obviously the outgrowth of right-handed practice. A left-handed teacher cannot be easily imi- tated, and hence is at a disadvantage in demonstrating manual exercises. These facts raise the question whether the left-handed child ought to be trained into a right-handed one. This question, in turn, leads to the more general one, as to whether it is feasible or desirable to train all children to be ambidextrous. Societies have been formed for the encouragement of ambidexterity, under the conviction that the human race is wasting its opportunities in neglecting the use of the less skilled band. It is probable, however, that dextrality is no mere accident of early training, but is an innate and thoroughly persistent tendency. Wilson ^^ argues that prehistoric man was right- handed. He adduces, among other evidences, the profile drawings of primitive men. He says that a spontaneous profile drawing, e.g., of a face, if done by a right-handed draftsman, will be represented looking to the left ; whereas, if it is done by a left- handed draftsman, it will be looking to the right. According to this test, he maintains that primitive man was right-handed. I tried this test upon fifty right-handed and two left-handed persons. All but three drew the profile as Wilson says, i.e., both left- handed subjects drew the profile facing to the right, and forty-seven right-handed subjects drew it facing MOTOR CAPACITIES 71 to the left. Of the other three, one subject reports herself as nearly ambidextrous. It would seem, then, from the observations upon young children, and from the probable facts about primitive men, but prin- cipally from the real difficulties which children ex- perience in trying to cultivate other-handedness, that dextrality is an inborn tendency. Evil results are said to follow the attempt to make a child change from using the hand which he natu- rally prefers. Nervousness, depression, awkwardness in hand-work, and possibly speech defect are among the alleged effects. Ballard ^^^ made a statistical study upon this point, and he presents results which deserve careful consideration. His figures are : Children observed 13,189 Dextrals 12,644 Sinistrals 545 Dextro-sinistrals 399 Stammerers 160 Dextro-sinistral stammerers 17 The dextro-sinistrals are those children who were originally left-handed, but who had been made to use the right. These figures show that the ratio of dextro-sinistral stammerers to the whole number of dextro-sinistrals is greater than the ratio of stam- merers in general to children in general. Among the purely left-handed the proportion of stammerers is no greater than among the purely right-handed. 72 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY These facts raise a presumption that there is some connection between stammering and ambidexterity. A more detailed study of the dextro-sinistral group yielded the fact that 17 per cent, stammered at the time of the inquiry, but that 25.8 per cent, had stam- mered at some time in their past. These figures do not, of course, prove that speech defect is certain to follow upon the attempt to change from one hand to the other, but they are enough to consti- tute a serious drawback to the cultivation of ambidex- terity. In giving statistics for right- and left-handedness a distinction should be made between ,superior skill and superior strength of the one hand over the other. The ratio of those who are left-handed in skill is prob- ably not greater than four or five per cent., whereas, the proportion of those who have greater strength in the left hand is considerably larger. I found, among one hundred eighteen-year-old girls, only one who was left-handed for writing, but twenty who had an index of dextrality (i.e., proportion of left-hand strength to right-hand strength) of one hundred or over. It is sometimes said that a large difference between the two hands is a sign of maturity. Thus Whipple ^° writes : " Dextrality, i.e., superiority of one hand over the other, is evident when the child enters school, but becomes increasingly evident as maturity approaches, and especially at puberty, so that a heightened dif- MOTOR CAPACITIES 73 fercnce in the strength of the hands may be regarded as one of the characteristic indications of pubertal change." I find some difficulty in verifying this point from the published tables. If one computes the index of right-handedness from Smedley's tables quoted above (p. 68), one finds the ratios to be as follows (Table X) : TABLE X Age BoyB Girls 6 92 92 7 94 93 8 94 93 9 93 93 10 94 93 11 94 93 12 92 93 13 92 93 14 92 92 15 92 92 16 92 92 17 91 92 18 91 92 Turning to Hastings's tables (quoted in Hall ^^^), we find measurements for 5,476 children, boys and girls being grouped together. One finds the indices running as follows: beginning with the five-year-olds, 96 per cent., 81 per cent., 92, 89, 95, 89, 93, 90, 90. Here the difference between the two hands is greatest at the age of six. I have also tried to find a correla- tion Avithin a homogeneous group, between the index of dextrality and the absolute right-hand strength. For 74 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY one hundred girls, averaging eighteen years, this com- parison gave r =^ .159, p.e., .043. If the tv/entj individuals whose index of dextralitj is one hundred or more are taken out of this group and the correla- tion computed for the remaining eighty, the result is r = .025, p.e., .047. Whipple " (Vol. I, p. 16) pub- lishes individual records for right- and left-hand grip for fifty boys. I have computed the index of dextral- ity for the individuals in this group and compared it with the order of strength of the right hand, with the result r = .015, p.e., .094. Excluding from this group the seventeen boys whose index is one hundred or more, r = — .134, p.e., .121. We know that strength of grip increases with maturity, but we do not find from these figures that the difference be- tween right- and left-hand strength correlates either with maturity or with strength of grip. The educational value of manual exercises has re- ceived an ever-widening recognition during the last half-century. It has won an assured place, not only in the training of defectives, but in the instruction of normal children as well. There are, of course, many unsolved problems connected with the teaching of manual training; one hears that it has proved a dis- appointment ; but in some form or other this general type of instruction is sure to retain its place in the school program. Ballard ^^'' gives an account of the changes which were effected in certain of the English MOTOR CAPACITIES 75 schools by the introduction of hand-work. The work of the children in the purely academic branches im- proved under the stimulation of the manual courses. In one school the change was reflected also in the decreased number of school punishments which had to be recorded after the installation of hand-work. Ballard gives some figures on the correlation between general school standing and standing in manual work. With younger children there is a rather high correla- tion between intelligence, as measured by school rank, and motor skill, as measured by rank in manual courses. With older children the correlation is less marked. The theory of hand-work is that it is primarily a training of mind and character, and only secondarily a training in specific acts of skill. Salomon ^^ avers that the best and chief results of sloyd would still be retained even though the child who had been trained in it were to lose both his hands. Eye-Hand Co-ordinations. — The eyes and hands show independent responses to objective stimuli long before they can co-operate in dealing with the same object. Co-ordinated eye-movements are sometimes made by children during the first days of life, though very often the eyes move at first more or less inde- pendently of each other. On the twenty-third day Preyer discerned in his son the fixation and following of a candle flame. Moore " reports this as taking 76 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY place on the second day in the case of her son, and on the fourth day in the case of her daughter. Jacoby ^* uses this fixation test as an index of mental develop- ment. If the reflex is not present at the end of the first year the child is considered to be retarded. It is not until the third or fourth month of the child's life that he can manage to reach out and grasp an object at which he is looking, and long after this age large errors are made in estimating the distance of objects. The process of gaining control over eye- hand co-ordinations will be mentioned in connection with the learning process. Many special acts are to be included in this category, such as writing, draw- ing, the multitude of skilled acts required by the fine and the industrial arts, and the numerous adjust- ments of daily life. Such of these processes as call for great delicacy and precision should certainly not be required of the young child. Neither his stage of physiological development nor his intellectual interests will warrant any insistence upon minute accuracy. Voice Control. — There is a kind of vocal experi- mentation or play described by Groos Avhich is the basis of later conscious vocalization. Preyer main- tains that the great majority of the sounds which the child will later use in articulate speech are actually formed correctly by him as early as the eighth month of life, and that he utters other complex sounds which MOTOR CAPACITIES 77 never are needed. These first sounds are not lan- o-i.age, because they are not used with specific mean- ings; they are simply a series of gymnastic exer- cises. This impulse to vocalize, guided by the tendency to imitate, brings the child to the begin- nings of speech at about the fifteenth or sixteenth month, as we have seen. Opinion is uniform on the point that right train- ing in vocal habits ought to begin at a very early age. The establishment of correct pronunciation of a for- eign language usually needs an early start, though nine or ten is not too late for the first instruction in a foreign tongue, unless one has an exaggerated re- gard for absolute purity of enunciation. The training of the singing voice has its many spe- cial problems. One of these is the question of the musical ear, which will be touched upon in the next chapter. Another is the determination of the ordi- nary range for the voices of children of various ages. The accompanying diagram. Fig. 6, is presented by Gutzmann.'^ The half notes represent the range for 78 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY boys, the quarter notes the range for girls. Individual voices range higher and lower than these limits, but the ranges given represent seventy-five per cent, of the voices examined by this investigator, and are a safe guide for the majority. The changes which occur at puberty are shown for boys' and girls' voices in Fig. 7, also from Gutzmann. The question of chorus-singing in schools is one upon which competent opinion is divided. The /\ J (U ' \ ^' (^ 6 vj h J^ J —^ 6 Fig. 7. points to be made in its favor are the pleasure which it gives to those who take part, the training which it gives in the reading of music, and the moral and in- tellectual effect of the team-work which is involved in any ensemble exercise. On the other hand, many teachers of singing believe that there is danger of injuring the finer voices in allowing them to sing in chorus. Moreover, in chorus-work it is impossible to keep any delicate check on accuracy of tone pro- duction by individuals, and hence bad habits may MOTOR CAPACITIES 79 become fixed. The significant work of Seashore's laboratory in the tonoscope measurements of vocal mnsic is giving lis a new conception of the possible delicacy of voice control, and of the effect upon it of adequate objective registration and criticism. CHAPTEE VI THE GKOWTH OF BEHAVIOR SENSORY CAPACITIES Is Sensation a Kind of Behavior? — If we think of sensations as mental elements or atoms we can scarcely call them modes of behavior, but if we think of them as so many acts of discrimination there is no difficulty. The idea that the mind is '^ made up of " simple elements is a figure of speech. Along with the perception of color, taste, temperature and the like, we classify perceptions of space and time. Now, we do not conceive that the mind is partly made of spaces and times, nor do we think of there being a ^' thing " called space or time. " Sensation " does not exist in any other manner than do space and time. Physiology has analyzed our nervous system into various parts, and has called some sensory and others motor, but this does not prove that we have different sorts of consciousness corresponding to the two parts. Psychologically we do not get sensation existing at one moment and a response to sensation at the next moment. What we get is an act in which a sensory basis and a motor basis are equally involved. All 80 SENSORY CAPACITIES 81 experience has a sensory-motor character, and the two aspects develop together. Cutaneous Sensation. — The skin as an end-organ is peculiar among the senses in having so much greater surface than the rest ; it is approximately twenty-two square feet in extent. It is peculiar also in forming a complete outer covering for the body, There is some ground for the idea that the dermal senses are especially important in the earliest part of life, for it is from the folds of this outer covering, the ectoderm in the embryo, that the other sense-organs and the whole nervous system have been formed. There is an amount of common observation which goes to show that men put more trust in the existence of things which are literally tangible to them than in things merely seen or heard. Dresslar *'*' has gath- ered together some data on this point, and cites, among other items, the curious legal fact that " bare words will not make an arrest," but that some form of actual contact is necessary to complete the legal act of arrest. The skin gives experience of pressure, pain, warmth and cold, as well as cues for the percep- tion of spatial relations. Of the pressure suscepti- bilities of children little is known beyond the fact that they probably are delicate, inasmuch as the skin itself is fine in texture. Concerning pain, Preyer writes that the newly born 82 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY child is known to be less sensitive to pain than are adults. Experiments on older children, however, show them to be more sensitive to pain than adults. Gilbert's ^^'^ researches upon boys and girls, ranging in age from six to nineteen, show that the pain threshold is lower for the younger children. This sensitivity decreases with the girls until about the age of thirteen, and with the boys until about fifteen. The threshold was lower at each age for the girls. Of temperature Preyer says that " the sensibility of the mucous membrane of the mouth, of the tongue, of the lips to cold and warmth ... is surpris- ingly great in infants during the first days." Exact observations on the comparative tempera- ture discrimination for different ages seem to be lacking. The so-called space threshold, the capacity to tell two points from one on the skin, is finer with chil- dren than with adults. Wissler " even found that college freshmen decreased in this type of sensitivity during their four years at college. Probably the same general distribution of this kind of sensitivity over the different parts of the body holds good for children as for adults. This distribution is ex- pressed in Vierordt's formula — that the more mobile parts are the more sensitive, i.e., a given area of skin is sensitive in proportion to its distance from SENSORY CAPACITIES 83 the central axis of rotation of the member to which it belongs. The child's greater sensitivity to skin experiences is striking as an exception to the general course of development of sense discriminations. A partial explanation lies in the fact that the total area of the child's skin is much smaller than the adult's, whereas the number of nerve endings is, in all likeli- hood, the same. The same number of nerve endings is condensed into less space. Whipple also remarks that the delicate texture of the child's skin is an- other reason for its greater sensitivity. Two pieces of evidence from adult psychology sug- gest that skin discrimination is capable of great variation under special conditions or under train- ing. Henri ''■ quotes a case in which a woman, while hysterical, could discriminate with surprising clear- ness the designs on a medal or coin when the object was laid on the skin at the back of her neck — a feat which is far beyond the capacity of a normal subject. The other reference is to the work of Dresslar ^° in training two subjects on the two-point threshold for a period of four weeks. An area on the forearm was tested. The average distance at which the two points were distinguished during the first week was 18 mm. and 21 mm., respectively, for the two subjects. The averages for the fourth week were 4.1 mm, and 2.8 mm., respectively. This very astonishing improve- ment, however, was short-lived ; for as soon as the 84 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY training stopped the thresholds began to increase again, and within a few weeks were practically where they had been at the beginning. Further, and much more extended observations are needed before any educational measures could be guided by such results, but these points do, at least, prompt some reflections as to the probability of any lasting benefit from early tactile training. Sensations from Muscles, Joints, and Tendons. — Studies have been made on children to test their power of discrimination between lifted weights. Gil- bert ^^^ reports that the six-year-old child will confuse weights which differ by as much as 18 grams, when the absolute weights compared are 82 and 100 grams. By the age of thirteen the child can distinguish a difference of 6 grams. Boys are superior to girls in this capacity. The perception of form through active touch depends in large part upon cues from the joints, tendons, and muscles. Meumann ^^ fitted the hand into a stiff glove, so shutting off finger movements and touch sensations. He then found that, by pass- ing the hand over an object so that the wrist move- ments come into play, a very effective idea of the shape of the object can be secured. He does not quote comparative results on children in this par- ticular. He does observe that the estimation of space intervals by movement seems, in children, to be finer with the large joints than Avith the smaller ones; SENSORY CAPACITIES 85 whereas with adults he supposes the reverse to be the fact. Taste and Smell. — Very little of a systematic sort is known about the gustatory and olfactory sen- sations of children. Preyer thinks that smell is prob- ably present from the time of birth. Taste, he says, is the best developed of all the senses at the time of birth. The end-organs for taste, — the taste-buds, — are distributed more widely in the buccal cavity in children than they are in adults. In the latter the taste-buds are usually limited to the tip, the edges, and the back of the tongue, and to the soft palate. In children they occur all over the surface of the tongue, in the mucous membrane of the cheeks, the soft palate, and the uvula. Auditory Sensations. — Children are deaf at birth, because of the amniotic fluid in the ears, but some- times within a few hours, and usually within a few days, a normal child responds to noises. Meumann gives it as the fifth month, Shinn ^^ as the ninth month, when an interest in auditory differences mani- fests itself. An apparent enjoyment of music some- times appears in the first year, and there are several cases on record of children who have been able to reproduce melodies accurately at about the end of the first year. Preyer gives three cases, and adds that these children could sing before they could talk. Bnrnham mentions a child of nine months who could 86 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY sing notes. Heilig ''^ reports a girl of thirteen months who could sing part of the scale. There are very great individual differences in this respect. Meu- mann says that the statistics of the Annaberger schools show that only twenty per cent, of the children when they enter can sing a song from memory, and about thirty-six per cent, can reproduce what is sung to them. Experimental work on children has been directed chiefly upon the detection of ear defects. Whipple criticises the loose nature of the tests employed to determine deafness, but gives as the percentage of individuals who " would be seriously inconvenienced in detecting sounds of medium intensity " (on the basis of Smedley's results) seven per cent, as defective in both ears, and ten per cent, as defective in one ear, i.e., seventeen per cent, as defective in one or both ears. The kind of sound which gave this propor- tion of deafness was the click of a telephone receiver. Other tests are also used in which whispered words are given as stimuli. Both these procedures are called tests of auditory acuity, or of the threshold for the perception of sound. This acuity is said by Seashore ^"^^ to improve up to the age of twelve. Another type of experiment requires the subject to tell the difference between two tones, sounded, for example, on the tuning-forks. This is the question of SENSORY CAPACITIES 87 pitch discrimination. According to figures given bj Gilbert, pitch discrimination improves from the age of six up to nineteen, the improvement being rapid up to about the age of nine, and slow there- after. This result is called in question by Seashore, who says that, in a bright child with a good ear, the physiological limit for pitch discrimination can be established for practical purposes as early as the age of five. Seashore ^^'^ studied pitch discrimination also with a standard fork of 435 vibrations, which was compared by his subjects with forks differing by 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, and 17 vibrations. He offers the fol- lowing tentative suggestion as a result of the applica- tion of this test : '' A child whose threshold is 2 or under (the numbers denote the fiftieths of a tone) may become a musician ; 3-8 should have a plain musical education (singing in school should be obligatory) ; 9-17 should have a plain musical edu- cation only if some special inclination for some kind of music is shown (singing in school should be optional) ; 18 or above should have nothing to do with music." Tn a later publication, Smith,''^ who worked with Seashore on the effect of training in pitch discrimination, says that the sensitivity of the ear to pitch differences cannot be improved appreci- ably by practice. Changes which seem to be due to practice in discrimination are often the result of the subject's improved concentration and familiarity 88 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY with the test conditions, rather than the result of actual change in sensitivity. Visual Sensations. — A number of investigations have been undertaken with very young children to determine the age at which color sensitivity begins. Early writers, like Preyer, have depended upon the child's ability to name the color pointed at, or to point at the color named, as an index of his capacity to discriminate. While there are obvious objections to accepting this as a sign of the child's sensory development, yet it is an item of some interest in itself to know at what age children may be expected to name colors correctly. Meumann quotes the find- ings of the Munich schools to the effect that, of the six-year-olds, thirty per cent, of the boys and twenty- eight per cent, of the girls who were examined could not name the four primary colors correctly. Prac- tically all could name black and white. The fre- quency of correct naming of the various colors is given as greatest for black, then white, red, blue, green, yellow, brown, gray, rose, violet, orange. Baldwin ^^ devised a method for testing the child's response to color which can be used at a much earlier age, namely, the " dynamogenic," or reaching and grasping method. Colors were placed in front of the child, one color at a time, at a measured distance. The distances were then varied, and the greater the space over which the child would reach to grasp the SENSORY CAPACITIES 89 color, the greater was her preference for that color assumed to be. The child was nine months old, and the results showed the preference for the colors used to be in the order: blue, red, white, green, brown. Woolley ^" modified this method by presenting the colors in pairs, and noting which one of the pair was grasped. She found that her child showed a liking for red in the sixth month, and, by the following month, had distinguished red, blue, and yellow. All the colors were preferred to the white, gray, and black. Of the colorless group, black was liked best, then gray, then white. Yet another method was tried by Valentine ^° on a three-months-old child. He found this child too young for the grasping method, so he measured the length of time during which the child gazed at one or the other of two colored wools which were held before him. Valentine's colors, he says, were very nearly equal in brightness, and his con- clusion is that there is good evidence that at the age of three months an infant may experience the sensations of red, yellow, brown, green, and blue. This seems to be the earliest period to which color sensitivity has been ascribed, though the child's eye is sensitive to differences of light and shade on the first day of life. Tests on the discrimination of color saturation were performed by Jones " on children of from five to fourteen years of age. He found a steady improve- 90 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY merit in this capacity during this entire period. Tucker "^ tested children from five to ten years old, first using the Holmgren wools for discrimination of hues. She writes : " Only three of the ten-year-old girls made any mistakes at all with the wools, and then it was simply to put blue wools with the violet test wool, a mistake which became universal among the younger children, and one which is made by all primitive peoples." With the tintometer she also tested thresholds for red, yellow and blue, and found a progressive lowering of the threshold going from the younger to the older children. Most investiga- tors find that the color perception of girls is some- what superior to that of boys, and that the per- centage of color-blindness is about four per cent, for boys, but only one-half of one per cent, for girls. Visual acuity, or the capacity to distinguish ad- jacent impressions on the retina, is most commonly tested by the reading of letters at given distances. Thus, on the well-known Snellen chart, the normal eye is supposed to read letters with a maximum di- ameter of 15 mm. at a distance of 9 meters. Ac- cording to such tests, the percentage of eye-defect among school children is as high as thirty. The range of color vision on the peripheral retina in children has been the subject of investigation by Luckey.^^ He examined seven-year-old and thirteen- SENSORY CAPACITIES 91 vear-old child roii, and two groups of adults, one of these groups being trained and the other untrained in artistic work with color. lie plotted the visual fields of all the subjects for blue, yellow, red and green, and for light and dark. His results show that the whole visual field for children is more restricted than it is for adults, and that the effect is yet more marked for colors than for black and white. Thus, in the case of the seven-year-old children, the ratio of the whole visual field to that of the adults was about as 78 is to 100, whereas, the ratio of the color field was about as 61 to 100. The ranges for the thirteen- year-old group stand nearly midway between the figures for the younger children and the adults. Luckey found no appreciable differences between boys and girls, and no significant'differences between the trained and the untrained adults. Perception of Space. — Whatever our theories as to the origin of space ideas, there can be little doubt that the vast and varied array of motor experiences which the child is constantly acquiring does much toward developing and clarifying those ideas. Our ability to estimate spatial extent is largely dependent upon the experience of traversing it, or moving some part of the body over it. The spatial knowledge of the very young child is at first limited to the dis- tance that he can reach. A frequent mistake is to grasp for things beyond that reach. When he 92 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY begins to creep and walk, he learns to correct his estimate of the distance of objects by traveling to them. Gilbert asked children, ranging in age from six to nineteen, to estimate in inches the length of a given line. The line was 50.8 inches in actual length. The six-year-olds gave an average estimate of only 10.7 inches, while the general course of the judgments may be summarized in the statement that, up to the age of fifteen, children judged the distance to be shorter than it actually was, but after that age they judged it to be longer than it was. The most accurate age w^as between fifteen and sixteen. Another of Gilbert's tests required children to estimate length by arm movement. The subject was allowed to look at a line 50.8 inches long, and then, with eyes closed, he was asked to move his arm over an equal distance. The results show that the mean error for the dif- ferent ages decreases from 10.9 inches with six-year- old boys to 1.3 inches for nineteen-year-old boys ; and from 8.9 inches with six-year-old girls to 1.3 inches for nineteen-year-old girls. Some of the illusions of space perception have been studied with children, but the results are not wholly unequivocal. Binet^^'' showed the Miiller-Lyer figures to two groups of children, aged nine and twelve. He concludes that the younger children are more sus- ceptible to the illusory effect than the older ones. SENSORY CAPACITIES 93 and that this is due to the greater care of the older group in making their judgments. The younger ones made up their minds at a glance, but the older made comparisons, and looked back and forth along the lines of the figures several times. Rivers ^^ also finds that this illusion is slightly greater with children than with adults. White/" however, compared the effect of a variety of forms of the illusion upon adults and upon children of six to fifteen, and finds that her tables do not show significant differences. I found no appreciable difference between a group of young women twenty-two years old and a group of children of twelve years in respect to this illusion. Observations have also been made on the vertical- horizontal illusion with children. Winch ^^^ says that it decreases with age, and with the child's progress in school. Some of Rivers' tables show a complete ab- sence of the illusion for the children whom he cites. In connection with this illusion and the preceding one Seashore ^^'' makes the following statement : " The illusions of the vertical and the Miiller-Lyer illusion do not vary in a marked manner with mental development ; but the illusions of judgment, e.g., the illusions of contrast and illusions of time, vary very much with mental development." Another illusion into which spatial experience enters shows some specially interesting variations. This is the size-weight illusion. Dresslar,'''^ who tried 94. EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY this test on groups of children seven to fourteen years old, does not report characteristic differences for the various ages, but he does find the illusion to be more consistently present with bright than with dull chil- dren. Gilbert, on the other hand, finds that, as be- tween the ages of six and seventeen, the illusion is fairly strong at six, then becomes even more marked up to nine, and from nine on gradually lessens. This illusion would seem to require as a precondition a certain amount of experience in associating sizes of objects with their weights. One usually expects that large things will be found heavy. We may sup- pose that from the age of six to nine this illusion increases because this background of experience is becoming more firmly established. But from the age of nine on an analysis of the weight experience and, an amount of correction are present. Those who study children's drawings, and chil- dren's interests in pictures, have noticed that the appreciation of form or shape precedes the recognition of position or the correct orientation of an object. Thus Ruttmann^^ says that for a long time it is immaterial to a child in what j^osition the picture in front of him stands. He seems to enjoy it either side up equally well. A parallel to this is found in adult experience under special conditions. Moore ^" has shown, in his study of abstraction, that it is pos- sible to perceive and remember a shape correctly, SENSORY CAPACITIES 95 without being able to tell whether it was right side up or not. Perception of Time and Rhythm, — Children's ideas of time and their capacity to estimate it arc relatively late acquisitions. According to Ziehen,'^ children from eight to ten years of age have very vague notions of long intervals like years and months. The capacity for estimating small intervals of time has been studied by Ilornibrook.'^* She held a white stimulus card before the subject for a definite length of time, and then asked the child to expose a similar card for an equal interval. The intervals which she chose were 5, 10, 20, and 30 seconds. The estimates of the children were as a rule far too short, as Table TABLE XI Age no. 5 sec. d 10 sec . d 20 sec. d .30 sec. d (judged as ) 6 ... . 19 5 2 6 2 10 4 9 6 7 ... , . 19 4 1 6 2 10 4 10 5 8 ... , . 23 4 1 7 2 14 5 13 7 9 .., , . 16 4 2 8 3 13 4 12 4 10 ... , . 15 5 2 8 2 15 4 17 6 11 ... . . 23 5 2 8 2 18 4 16 6 12 .., . . 20 5 1 8 2 14 3 13 4 13 .. . . 20 5 1 9 2 16 3 13 3 14 .. . . 19 5 1 8 2 15 3 12 4 15 .. . . 13 4 1 9 1 17 4 18 6 XI shows. The estimates for thirty seconds were free, i.e., without the use of the exposure card. Allied to the ability to estimate time is the feeling 96 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY for rhythm. Meumann reports that the ability to follow a given rhythm by tapping in unison with it is a difficult procedure for young children. Some sort of response to rhythm, however, certainly appears very early in the child's life. Sears,^^ in his work on rhythm, undertook to get questionnaire records, as well as direct experimental evidence, on the de- velopment of rhythmic capacity in children. To the question, how early in life do children begin to be interested in music with a marked rhythm, trying to dance or keep time with it, his returns indicate that such responses have been noticed in children six months old, but that the average age is about eighteen months for boys and seventeen for girls. Sears says also that there is a decided preference for duple over triple time, and that little children have a fondness for rhythms which are lively and fast. This early preference for march time gives place at an average age of eleven or twelve years to the prefer- ence for waltz time. One further point has a peda- gogic bearing, viz., that according to the majority of replies, young children may learn to dance in good rhythm as early as three or four years. In the experimental part of Sears's work, children were directed to reproduce, by tapping with a pencil, a series of seven different rhythms, which the experi- menter tapped for them. The first and simplest of these rhythms has two quarter notes and a quarter SENSORY CAPACITIES 97 rest to the measure, the most complex has two quar- ters, four sixteenths, and one quarter note to the measure. A few children were unable to tap any of the rhythms. Out of about thirteen hundred chil- dren there were three boys and six girls, all of them under seven, who could not do any. For the rest ..." Increase in ability to express rhythm by tapping movements seems to be rapid up to nine or ten years. After this age progress is slower up to fifteen or sixteen years, after which there is possibly a falling away in skill. . . . Those having had spe- cial training in music were more successful in the execution of the tests. ... A comparison of rhythmic ability and rank in school work leads to the con- clusion that good ability in executing rhythms and intellectual aptness are more frequently associated than otherwise." The early development of rhythmic interest, the fact that it can be expressed through the fundamental muscles, and the fact that it offers great opportuni- ties for training in mental and physical co-ordination, mark it out as a peculiarly fit medium for work with young children. The method of Jaques Dalcroze and his school shows through how, systematic and varied a program the exercises in rhythm may be carried, — and Avith what happy effect. Pedagogical Corollaries. — In the preceding pages a number of specific items have been cited regarding 98 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY the sensory capacities of children. It is time to ask what influence any of these facts may have in de- ciding questions of school practice. First let us inquire : is it necessary or advisable to have, in schools or kindergartens, formal exercises in sense- training ? It will be recalled that Groos, in enumerat- ing the forms of play, speaks of the experimental exercise of the senses as one of the spontaneous inter- ests of childhood. Many of the present practices in kindergartens, both of the Froebel and the Montessori type, involve close attention to sensory discrimina- tions. For example, the game of Silence, in which the children sit with closed eyes waiting while the teacher wdiispers the name of each, and each responds by tiptoeing up to her, is a rough form of the auditory acuity test. It is safe to say that, in the form of games, and for short periods of time, sense-training is a proper exercise for kindergarten children. In the grades, however, the regular work in music, paint- ing, and manual arts gives much incidental exercise of the senses. Moreover, there is evidence to show that sensory capacity will develop in relative inde- pendence of any conscious training. This develop- ment is instinctive in the sense that the child seems spontaneously to find occasions for the use of his powers. It would probably, therefore, be superfluous to set apart any regular hour in the curriculum of the grades for formal work in sense discrimination. SENSORY CAPACITIES 99 In considering the application of the psychology of the senses to pedagogic problems we ought to keep in mind the two distinct functions of sense-training and sense-testing. Whatever the decision as to the need for sense-training, there can be little doubt of the need for testing children's sensory capacities. A few such tests are included in any regular medical examination, but a more complete psychological examination ought to bring to light many significant individual differences among school children. These examinations ought to be a part of the regular school regime. In Seinig's school in Charlottenburg every boy knows the focal distance of his own eyes, and he is seated accordingly in the classroom. The teacher who knows that a certain child is deaf in one ear can make a similar provision for that fact. An important point to realize is that the child himself cannot be relied upon to give notice of his sensory incapacity, since he frequently does not realize it. Whipple writes : " Defective hearing, like defective vision, may exist in serious degree and yet pass un- noticed by child, teacher, parents, or friends. Of the thirteen per cent, found defective by Sexton, only three per cent, were themselves aware of any defect, and only one of them was known to be deaf by his teachers." This is comprehensible when we remem- ber that the defective child has, in many cases, never known what it is to see or hear normally. The in- 100 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY cident is told about a little girl who was deaf from birth, that she learned to communicate with others by lip movements, and never realized that there was anything more to language than that, until one day she noticed that other people could talk to one an- other without looking. Children are often credited with dullness or inattention when the real trouble is a sense-defect which they are too timid or too inex- perienced to report. CHAPTER VII THE LEARNING PROCESS General Characteristics of Children's Movements. — Children's movements are, on the whole, irregular and uncertain as compared with adult movements. A stimulus, instead of starting some definite and appro- priate reaction, often appears to overflow into the organism in all its parts, just creating a vague com- motion. This is sometimes called the law of diffuse discharge. It does not mean that the movement so started is entirely indefinite or non-specific in its re- sult, but it does mean that there is an amount of response at large, which will be irrelevant, and that the appropriate element is helplessly afloat in these irrelevancies. I watched a child, four months old, trying to get her bottle of milk. It was held before her within reach of her arms. As soon as her eyes had fixated it her whole body began to squirm with animation, her arms shot out and began to wave up and down at the sides of her body, but she could not get the bottle. The eye-hand co-ordination had not yet been isolated, and she could not converge her hands upon the source of the optical stimulus. The 101 102 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY folloAving passage from Major's ^° notes on his son gives much the same picture : " A watch was held about seven inches from his chest and about eight inches from his eyes. At first he lay very still, not a muscle stirring, gazing. Then he began to kick rapidly, and one arm flew up and chanced to strike the watch. ... It seemed as if the sight of the bright object set the kicking and arm-throwing muscles in motion." Even an older child, say a boy learning to write, illustrates this stage of diffuse discharge. He will grasp the pencil not only with his hand but with his whole soul, and will employ his lips, his tongue, his feet, and everything that is his in order to bring the letters to pass. The amount of energy put forth by unskilled persons in the first effort to do any complex thing is greater than the energy which will later suffice. This " superfluous energy " may not be in reality superfluous as an initial stage, but it will diminish in time, because the effect of repeti- tion is to lessen the amount of energy necessary to the act, and because one learns to drop off the ir- relevant parts. A special form of the law of diffusion is the law of symmetry, or the simultaneous innervation of sym- metrical parts of the body. If a young child's foot is tickled, both feet are likely to make responsive move- ments. The arms also tend to move at the same time and in similar ways when one of them is stimulated. THE LEARNING PROCESS 103 The hands and the fingers obey the same impulse. It is a distinct advance when the paired movements break up and the two hands, for instance, either work successively or do different things at the same time. Oddly enough the eyes, which later function sym- metrically, are often actuated independently during the earliest weeks. This would seem to be an excep- tion to the general observation on paired movements. The last stage in the development of a movement sees the disappearance of the irrelevant parts and the reduction of it to a facile and isolated act. Ob- jectively, then, the new act passes through successive phases of narrowing down. From the first wholesale agitation of the body, through a smaller block of re- actions, like the symmetrical ones, to its final specific form, there is a progressive elimination of the non- essentials. The details of this process, and the sub- jective side of this process of winning vcduntary control of an act, will occupy us presently. Inhibition in Children. — The inhibitive power of children is notoriously weak. Hancock *^ tested the ability of children to stand still by meas.uring those swaying movements which every one makes in some degree when standing erect. The excursion of these movements proved to be much greater in the children whom he tested than in the adults. Curtis ''^ similarly reports upon the ability of children to sit still. He observes: "Children under five could not sit still 104 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY longer than thirty seconds in the test. Children under ten could not sit still longer than one and a half minutes." It is possible for a child to become enough absorbed in some occupation to keep still rather longer than this, but a deliberate sitting still, just because he is told to do it, is well-nigh impos- sible for the ordinary child. This is not surprising when we stop to think what inhibition really means. It is not merely a negative thing; it is a positive checking of something which has got a start. More- over there is method in this checking: you do not stop by just stopping ; you do it by launching a con- trary impulse. Hence a general power of inhibition means that a general system of balances and checks has been established. The school should take account of the child's lack of inhibition, both in its methods and in its equip- ment. The teacher who expects to hold a child to a given task for half an hour or more ought to make occasion for changes of posture and for freedom of movement. This can be done by blackboard work and by the use of games. School desks and seats should be so isolated that the motions of one child do not disturb another. Double seats and seats which have the desk attachment on the back for the next seat behind are, for this reason, not satis- factory. The total sum of movements which a child per- THE LEARNING PROCESS 105 forms during a day is said to be far greater than that which an adult commonly goes through. Of course the child is not capable of the sustained effort of the adult, cannot effect so much with his muscles at one stroke, and is not capable of all those inhibitions which take their toll of nervous and muscular energy even when they do not show as overt action. Yet Curtis,^" who studied the matter by affixing pedom- eters to his subjects, concludes that, " The activity of children below six, as shown by pedometer records, is greater than at any later period." It is from this wealth of early activity that certain responses are selected, improved, and confirmed into the forms of adult conduct. Movement and Its Idea. — It was pointed out by James that a voluntary act is never a completely fresh experience; for, in order to will a thing, you must know what it is that you are willing. You must at some time have had an involuntary experi- ence of the movement, must have done it by accident, or instinctively, or have been put through it by some other person. It is possible, however, to experiment for new movements and to will new combinations of old ones. Now, suppose we wish to give a subject the cue to some new process. If no amount of pure willing on his part can give him the hang of it, how is he to get the feeling of it into consciousness ? In order to answer this question let us consider sev- 106 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY eral illustrations of the learning process, or types of learning. Trial and Error. — If a child is in the presence of an irritating object, like a parent who is punishing him, an object which he finds it hard to get rid of, he is likely to do any or all of these things: to strike, scratch, kick, bite, scream, twist, weep, and implore. He hurls his whole arsenal of weapons against the offender, hoping that something will work. It is the situation of diffuse discharge once more. Not know- ing the right thing to do, he tries everything he does know. This keeping at it with one's entire repertory of responses is like the animal's method of getting results. It is trial and error, then more trial and more error until, by chance, one hits the right thing. We have popular phrases for it in " brute persistence " and " dogged determination." In this method of learning, we might say, there is a high birth-rate and a high death-rate of responses. It is, therefore, likely to be a slow and wasteful method. In Fig. 8 is shown the first trial, and in Fig. 9 the third trial of a ten-year-old girl in tracing the outline of a star while looking at its reflection in a mirror. The first trial took 14 minutes 2 seconds, the third trial 1 minute 56 seconds. Her comment on the performance was: " When I push it one way it goes another. Oh, this is quite an- tao-onistic! " In addition to the loss of time and the THE LEARNING PROCESS 107 waste of energy which appear to characterize this method, there is a further difficulty, and that is the task of foro-etting all th(> wrong ways of doing a thing and remembering only the right one. Some of these wrong ways may have been repeated many times, and all of them have some tendency to recur, simply because they have once happened. We shall return in a later paragraph to this question of how the right Fig. 8. Fig. 9. way comes to be retained as against the more fre- quently experienced wrong ways. Learning by Impersonation, or Imitation. — The second type of learning is a process in which one takes advantage of the fact that somebody else can show how the desired act is done. The term " imi- tation " has been used in so many different senses that it is better to choose for our purpose some less equivocal expression, and the phra=e " learning by 108 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY impersonation " is here suggested for that kind of learning which copies an act performed by another individual. We need not discuss here the question whether impersonation is instinctive, nor whether it is practised by animals, but we may assume with- out argument that it does exist in human children, and that it is regularly employed as a means of in- struction in school. " Showing how " is, for some acts of skill, the only effective means of teaching, and a flexible and sympathetic impersonator readily falls in with this kind of instruction. This is an essentially human and social type of learning. It presupposes some degree of mental development, since the feeble-minded are said to be non-imitative. Children's play is often an exercise in '^ following the leader," and the child who constantly plays policeman, or soldier, or teacher, or what not, is so much the more facile in putting himself into the attitude of any one who tries to set him an example. Adjustment to Crises. — A different case presents itself in situations where no personal example is available, and in which the end must be reached by a single performance, with no trial series. The young surgeon in his first major operation on a human subject illustrates the case. He has watched older men do similar operations, and has himself worked on animals, but these things give him only approxi- mations to the real experience. From the moment THE LEARNING PROCESS 109 when the first incision is made, he must carry out a series of reactions to a set of stimuli which are, in many points, essentially new. Similarly, the soldier must stick to his training and make it tell in the face of a thousand surging stimuli, for which his imagined manoeuvers have been but a pale prepa- ration. Turning to a less heroic example, we may analyze this type of learning in more detail. I recall the experience of ringing the chimes without pre- liminary practice. The tune to be played was familiar, and I did some mental practising by imagining the sequence of notes on the ropes, and deciding which hand to use for certain ones. I had never felt the actual pull of the ropes, and, as no practice was permitted, I could not anticipate the amount of strength it would take, nor the precise point in the pull where the decisive jerk must be given, though I tried to imagine these things by watching another person. When the moment for my debut arrived I pulled the first rope. Things then became complex. The realization, " Oh, that's the way it feels ! " was accompanied by the recognition that I had not pulled hard enough. It was hard to think of the tune and to get on to the next note in time, instead of stopping over the new phase in the experi- ence, namely, the feel of the thing. I knew that tune as an auditory and a visual series, but I did not know it at all as a series of muscular pulls in my 110 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY hands and arms. I wilted with relief when the last note came, only to be jerked up with the quick command: ''Go straight through it again." I sup- pressed the tendency to argue, and did finally finish in required order. The essential feature about this type of learning is that the learner takes an estab- lished series of facts or ideas into a situation where they are controlled by a novel stimulus. If he can retain the essential elements of the old series and not be swept off his feet by the untried system of cues, then he learns to apply his habits or ideas to some new case. Mechanical Isolation of the Cue. — There is still another kind of learning situation which we must examine, even though it may prove to be not a really diiferent sort of learning process. This is the case in which a teacher consciously isolates the feeling or cue to the new act for the pupil, often through the agency of some mechanical device. Some examples will make this clearer. In teaching deaf children to speak, the first part of the process can be accom- plished by imitation. Thus Thompson " writes : " The attention is first attracted by gymnastic move- ments of the body and its parts, which are imitated by the pupil. In the beginning these movements are large, but they are gradually narrowed down to the face and lips and tongue, thus directing the attention to the movements tliat must be watched in the ac- THE LEARNING PROCESS 111 quisitiou of speech and lip-reading." There comes a time when this imitation will carry the child no fur- ther. He learns to make the same external mouth movements that his teacher does, but no sound comes out. To get the sound, say, of p, the breath must be exploded through the lips. The teacher, therefore, holds the child's hand up where he can feel the gust of air which is bloA\Ti out when the sound really comes, or a bit of paper which is made to flutter, or a candle flame to flicker, with the expulsion of the breath. The child is then encouraged to try to open the lips and to blow out the candle flame at the same time. When he succeeds in doing this he is saying the letter p. The blowing on the hand, the paper, or the candle flame is the mechanical means for get- ting the child to feel the necessary cue. To distin- guish between p and f, the candle flame is held in different positions, when t is correctly sounded the column of air from the lips goes down, and the flame must be held low, whereas for p the flame is held straight in front. (I am indebted to Dr. Mabel Fernald for calling my attention to these facts con- cerning the teaching of the deaf in the Chicago schools.) Another illustration of the same principle is found in the devices used by some teachers of singing. The throat formation which is desired for some vocal exercises is present in the yawning reflex. The stu- 112 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY dent who can induce a voluntary yawn, or who pays attention during an involuntary one to the feeling in his throat, finds there the cue to the voluntary con- trol of an " open " throat. This cue must be isolated from the complex in which it occurs, and instead of being associated with the intake of breath, as in the natural yawn, it must be associated with the giving out of the breath, as in a singing tone. The singer, in a sense, learns to do this for himself, but it needs the perception of the teacher to tell him in the first place that the feeling in the yawning throat is the one that he is to work for. Much the same forma- tion of the throat is present also in the vomiting reflex, and the student who will touch the throat so as to provoke the initial phase of this reflex may, by attention to the muscular sensations, get a clear realization of the cue. Other devices, such as imagin- ing an egg held in the mouth, or the saying of syl- lables like " ow," are sometimes useful. An appre- ciation of these points is certainly a help to some students in the acquisition of voluntary control, though some devices work with one student and not with another. A further example of the same sort appears in the teaching of the German u umlaut, as follows: The pupil is told to say " oo," then to say " ee," then " 00," then " ee," etc., in rapid succession. When, after practising these mouth gymnastics, the student THE LEARNING PROCESS 113 is thoroughly conscious of the positions, he is told to hold the mouth in the '' oo " position, and without relaxing it to try to say " ee." The result is the ii sound. Montessori ^* tells how she tried to teach a feeble- minded girl to darn stockings. The girl could not get the correct movement of the needle, so a change was made to the Froebel mat-weaving exercise. In the weaving, movements similar to the darning were involved, but they were on a coarser scale. These the girl did learn, and when the finer material was once more taken up, she was able to transfer the acquired skill to the desired medium. In this, as in each of the preceding cases, the learning was made possible be- cause the teacher first perceived the similarity between the desired movement and some aspect of an established reflex or habit already possessed by the learner. The classical experiment in teaching control of a formerly unknown movement is that of Bair,^^ who taught his subjects to move their ears. He began by giving an electrical stimulation to the retrahens mus- cle of the ear. By this artificial contraction a definite kinesthetic idea of the movement was given to the subject. At first the movement would stop as soon as the electric current was withdrawn, but gradually the subject's efforts began to make a difference. The difference showed at first as a reinforcement of the 114 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY artificial contraction. At length, by dint of much facial contortion, they were able to move the ear a little, independently of the current. From that point on, the force of the voluntary contractions became greater, and the irrelevant parts of the complex began to drop away. The simultaneous movements of the two ears, and the motions of jaws, eyebrows, and scalp, were dispensed with. ^' Learning to make a voluntary movement," says Bair, " is largely a mat- ter of learning to relax." It is the same story every- where, — the relaxed throat in singing, the relaxed wrist in piano-playing, the relaxed body in swim- ming, — and in teaching! Complete mastery means that all superfluous items have been eliminated, and that no unnecessary energy is being used. Expert movements are always economical and graceful. Learning by Abstract Ideas. — We are said to have learned something when a new fact or conviction has come to us, either as a result of our own reasoning, or as a communication from some one else. There is no practice series in this kind of learning. Fur- thermore it differs from any of the preceding kinds of learning in that it is less immediately connected with overt action. It need not show up in conduct until a remote day. " To learn " in this sense does not differ from " to apprehend, or understand." " I learn " from the morning paper the date of a concert, I learn from a map how to find a certain street in THE LEARNING PROCESS 115 the city, or I learn by inference that my dog has heen killing cats. All these bits of information will be used evcntnally, but the range of time may vary im- mensely. It is so in the case of abstract ideas gen- erally, they are a kind of long-distance learning. We must now ask whether the several instances described above are indeed separate types of learning, or whether there are essential similarities among them. Relations Between Types of Learning.— Trial and error has been called a slow and wasteful method, and certainly there are times when a personal example to copy would save many hours of fruitless experi- mentation. On the other hand, if we take a suf- ficiently critical attitude toward the first attempt at impersonation, or following a model, we are sure to find that this first trial is not absolutely exact. As we watch, for instance, the child trying to imitate the writing movements of his teacher, we see that he is going through the trial and error performance all over again, only it is confined Avithin a narrower circle. It is seldom possible for the learner to settle into the right form without a season of groping and feel- ing about. Impersonation, then, does not eliminate trial and error, but it does give the first gross adjust- ments to a new act, and cuts down the necessary range of trial. In learning by a single performance we have 116 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY something which is akin to learning by abstract ideas. In the handling of a crisis we transfer to it ideas about similar situations. If similar crises recur there occurs a gradual improvement in the capacity to handle them. In fact, wherever improvement in a series of acts occurs, we may say that there has been elimination of error. In the case of reasoning, or learning by abstract thought, it is probable that there is habitually present a genuine analogue to the trial and error method of animal learning. The following quotation from Edison ^° is not an isolated instance. He says : " Through all those years of experimenting and research (on the electric light), I never once made a discovery. ... I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded and another theory evolved. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet, only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory." Similar accounts are given of Dar- win and others, all going to show that the great thinker passes through a stage of ideal trial and error in arriving at his theories or generalizations. Trial and error, instead of being merely a sub-human method of solving difficulties, seems to be an essential THE LEARNING PROCESS 117 phase of the thought process itself. Jevons has sug- gested that great minds make uiore mistakes than lesser ones, but do not repeat their mistakes. It is not the absence of mistakes, but their rapid elimina- tion which is a mark of intelligence. A rich supply of alternative reactions is the best basis for learning, and " errors " are the regular preliminary to the selection of the best response. Fertility of response, then, is the first condition of educability. The second is the social milieu. Other people furnish models for impersonation or imita- tion. They help the learner to analyze and isolate the cues to action, they communicate their own ex- periences to him, and they help him to judge of his own success in performing a new act. In all these ways they shorten and expedite the learning process. It is safe to say that most cases of human learning exhibit in some degree these two factors, the origi- nal fertility of the individual, and the standards of criticism, the checks, which society builds up for him and in him. Some Learning Curves. — Fig. 10 shows the prog- ress of a young woman, twenty-one years old, in nine trials with the star-tracing test. The solid line gives the time in seconds for each trial, ranging in this case from llY on the first to 65 on the last trial. The dotted line gives the errors in terms of the num- jber of departures from the line, i.e., the superfluous 118 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY or errant movements. The broken line gives the error in the amount of line left untraced, i.e., work 120— - - - -- — —_ - —_ - -_- , \ . _ - 110 ' L I -,n« V " _:__-- 100 -^ ± 90 - ^ - . - _ - t ^„ I _____ 80 J _ "" H -t- i t 25 \ -!^S __ 2- s 70 .^'^ S ^^. /- 5 •^ 5 IK .^ ^ - ^ ^ ^ ^^ ^^ V - ^ ;^s. +^^ ^^ ^^^ ^ 60 ^^ ""^ ^ C ' "I -t "* t lis X -T- 50 ^"ir t tt ^ J ^ ^ + V t '^ 40 " ~ " V 2^~" \. ~ ~ 30 ^ - ^^ X Z V ""^^^ i- ^ -, ■• ^;zt ZrE-^ t '^ j^-'- ^ t^ ^r :^ 30 . + I ^^ _^ 3 X^- •- 10 - a! ' r o: ______ Fig. 10. not done. The curves show that in this task there was a decrease in speed, a decrease in error or super- THE LEARNING PROCESS 119 fluoiis movement, and an increase in accuracy. There are wide individual variations in this test. I gave one trial each to 106 college girls, averaging eighteen years of age. The median speed was 2 minutes, the range was from 36 seconds to 8 minutes 17 seconds, and there were two who failed to get around the star in the fifteen-minute time limit. The median error (untraced line) was 162.5 mm., the range of error heing from 11 mm. to 351 mm. The next learning curve, Fig. 11, is derived from ■ ~ r J" I - - - - - - - - - -- - 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 — " " " ■" " mean error A \, — m ;S \ ^ \ L, , ^ ^r *^ 1 - -.— •^Q \ , [- L_ -_ }j3 \ >. _ _ 1 1 _ — ^. - i^ ■■ " '-- - .. . * ■- -^ ~ ^ Uo — ■" ^ •^ w^ ^r- ^ — ~ '> L iH '>. ^ «• ^ ■^ 1 _ __ ^ _ __ _ J _ J L_ L_ L 1_ L L LU 10 circles per day lor lU days Fig. 11. a test in which the subject practised drawing per- fect circles. The center of the circle and one point on the circumference were given, and the subject was directed to draw with one stroke of the pencil a circle ten centimeters in diameter. The subject was allowed to look at a model circle of the right size. To estimate the error a diagram like Fig. 12, drawn on trans- 120 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY parent paper, was laid over each trial circle, and the number of millimeters was measured by which the trial circle diverged from the model, at each of the eight radii. The sum of these deviations was taken as a rough index of the total error. The most striking- fact about the curves derived from this test is the slowness and uncertainty of improvement. They Fig. 12. show no sharp initial drop, as the star-tracing curves usually do, but proceed almost horizontally. This we may interpret to mean that even in the first trial this test does not call for an adjustment to a really new situation, such as the subject meets in the star-tracing test. All the subjects knew how to draw a circle in the sense of knowing the kind of movement, and the direction to make it in. Hence, the test starts at a relatively later stage of the learning process than does THE LEARNING PROCESS 121 the star-tracing test, in which the feeling is new and puzzling. With the circles we start closer to the " physiological level " of skill, and the problem of practice is merely to perfect a habit which is already understood on the mental side. Fig. 13 shows the variation of one subject during the first day's practice (solid line) and during the last day's prac- tice (dotted line). This difference illustrates the fact 7i 1 1 I 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 I 1 1 I 1 1 H — 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 M 1 1 errnr curvp of first day ^ 5l ci::-::- Tc b t-S -4- ■ L 1 5 C-* " - i- - L._ 5-*,^ -- - - f S , t \ X ^ _-*s. 1 t^ - rrnrfK A \ I - - s. 4 - - t f % 7 \ ^. ^' H \ 7 1 \r ^ 9 X ] - - - - \ I - 6- \- '- s, T,*^ ^s^ t L ^^^ \ : St aiiii^s-:^:::::: ':::::: ^-> ^—^--\-\ Z ^\ y Xj ^"'i^ '- y ^^ t ^jt^r.--— [t^^. 1 7 \,^ V ^ J^_ 1 ^ V '^^ A__ Fig. 13. that variation tends to decrease toward the end of a practice series. Woodworth"" reports, as a result of aiming tests, that, as an individual improves in skill, his successive trials become more and more uni- form, and that a diminishing variability means a 122 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY diminishing possibility of improvement, i.e., it means the approach to the physiological limit of skill. The work of Bryan and Harter ^^^ called attention to the existence of " plateaus " in the learning curve. By plateaus they mean sections in the learning curve which are nearly horizontal, and which indicate, therefore, periods of no apparent improvement. These periods vary in length from days to months. Whether they are necessary stages in all learning curves which are sufficiently extended is a question which, unfortunately, cannot be answered until more evidence is available. It is possible that the pub- lished curves which do not show such plateaus might do so if the records of practice were kept up for months or years. The question is one of considerable importance for the school ; for, on the one hand, when a pupil strikes a plateau his teacher may urge him to keep persistently at work, on the theory that it is essential to pull through this period of marking time, and on the other hand, there is the theory that these levels are unnecessary and vicious and that the pupil had better take a rest. It is conceivable that per- sistent drilling on a performance, without improve- ment, only tends to fix it as it is, in an inferior stage, and makes it harder to break through finally into an improved form. From this point of view no drill should ever be mere drill, but should always be accompanied by the effort to make each individual THE LEARNING PROCESS 123 performance the best From this point of view the following, from a teacher of singing, is exactly wrong: " Practice ... is singing the same thing over and over again without the slightest effort to find a bet- ter way, without experimenting, just singing for so long a time a day with your mind on something else. And then when you have done that a few thousand times, by the virtue of repetition, your voice keeps getting better and better." Practising one thing with your mind on something else is fairly sure to lead to slipshod results. Let us resume, now, the chief items which have been established about the learning process. On the subjective side: (a) The idea of a new movement comes first from the involuntary performance of it. (b) This performance is usually a part of a complex, as in the case of diffuse discharge, and of symmetrical movements, (c) Its essential cue must be analyzed, isolated, and applied to the new purpose. On the ohjedive side, that is, as judged by learning curves : (a) There is at first a large and obvious improve- ment, i.e., a steep change in the curve, (b) In some curves plateaus occur, (c) Improvement is irregular from day to day, or from trial to trial, (d) The rate of improvement in later phases of the curve is not so great as in the first, (e) Variability decreases as the limits of improvement arc approached. In the star-traeJPg and circle-drawing curves, as 124 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY well as in the results on typewriting by Bryan and Harter,*^'' and on learning to toss balls, by Swift/" the skill involved is partly mental and partly physical. Improvement records have been kept also for func- tions which are more purely mental. Swift reports his progress in learning the Russian language, and Thorndike "^® gives records of practice in arithmetical computation carried on without objective aid. The curves are essentially similar to those which represent a combination of mental and physical skill. The Role of Pleasure and Pain in Learning. — The question arose, in connection with the discussion of trial and error, why is it that the successful at- tempt to do an act becomes associated with the desired object, to the exclusion of all those other attempts which may have been more frequently re- peated. How does the right way get fixed in memory ? In the series of letters given belowj suppose that X is a desired object, and X' is the idea of the object or the stimulus which first starts us toward the ob- ject. Let the other letters represent different ways of trying for X, of which e only is correct. Why X' abacccdce X should not c, which is the most frequent, or a, which has the advantage of primacy in the series, be as likely to occur again as e, which in this series occurs but once ? The usual answer is that the successful way THE LEARNING PROCESS 125 is remembered because of the pleasure which it gives. This statement, however, needs some expansion or modification. If, by pleasure, we mean simply agree- able feeling or affective tone, then it is doubtful whether it does have any direct effect in stamping in an impression. I made experiments ^^"- with adult subjects to see whether " pleasant, unpleasant, or in- different " combinations of color stimuli were the easiest to recall. The subjects were directed to attend to each color design as it was thrown on the screen, and to reproduce its details afterward. They also judged each design as pleasant, unpleasant, or in- different. The affective reaction of the subjects ap- peared to have no connection with the success of the recall. Peters,^* however, who has made a recent study of experiences which are recalled in response to a given word stimulus, and has classified the re- sponses affectively, finds that there is a higher per- centage of recall for agreeable experiences. The disparity between these results may be reconciled. Kiilpe*^ says, commenting upon my tests, that the subjects were required by the conditions of the ex- periment to attend to the unpleasant and indifferent stimuli as closely as to the pleasant ones, and that it is attention which determines recall. Ordinarily, he suggests, it is the agreeable stimulus which commands attention, and that it is on account of the attention thus given, not on account of the affective quality as 126 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY such, that the pleasant may be better recalled. Peters also finds that there is a difference in the ratio of pleasant experiences recalled according as those events were recent or remote in time. Among remote events recalled there is a higher percentage of the pleasant. Peters agrees with Frend that the desire to forget the unpleasant often results in an actual forgetting. Attention is withdrawn, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately, from painful memories, and this accounts for the high percentage of pleasant memories among reported happenings. To return to the question of the "■ stamping in " of the successful reaction, it is probably more ac- curate to say that it is not the pleasure, so much as the attention stimulated by it, which makes the dif- ference. Should this distinction seem immaterial to the student, there is another way of putting the matter. The successful movement is attended to and retained because it fits into a whole act, or an organized system of acts, as none of the wrong re- actions do. The idea of the object, the correct move- ment, and the object attained make a series which has inner connection and meaning. In a later dis- cussion on memory we shall see that the factor of meaning or coherence is one of the strongest in mak- ing an impression permanent. Accordingly we may say that it is the fitness of the right movement which accounts for its persistence. CHAPTER VIII IMAGINxYTIOK Imagery and Imagination. — The revival in idea of the sensuous qualities of things is a form of human behavior. Let a man hear a melody, see a picture, or breathe a perfume, and he may find that, later, when all his surroundings are quite changed, those tones, that vision, or that fragrance are living in him again in their essential quality. We call it imaging. Sometimes these likenesses are large and vivid and faithful in form, sometimes they are small and changed. Some he remembers, and knows their origin, others seem foreign and unknown to him. Usually he can tell that they are ''just images," but upon occasion he mistakes one for a really present object, and has an hallucination. Again, he can order these images about at will, hold them firm, or knead them into divers forms. At other times they get the upper hand, holding his attention whether he likes it or not, and even suggesting with imperious force the performance of some unwelcome deed. Imagery thus appears to be a very pervasive aspect of mental activity; it is present in dreaming, in 127 128 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY remembrance, in invention and in reasoning. " The consciousness of objects not present to sense," as Angell defines imagination, very well expresses the broad and inclusive nature of the conception. It is customary to distinguish two kinds of imagi- nation, — reproductive and productive, — and to de- scribe the former as a more or less exact copy of some previous sensory experience, and the latter as a re- arrangement into new form of the reproduced ma- terial. This is a useful distinction, provided it is not understood to mean that there are two sharply distinct types of imagination. Reproduction refers to the origin of the image, and to cases of imagination in which the origins are apparent; whereas production refers rather to the destination or use of the image, and cases in which it may be hard to trace the origins. In all imagination both factors are present. We might substitute for reproductive and productive imagina- tion the terms " content " and " function " of imagi- nation. In the current use of the word, " imagery " generally means the content, and the word " imagina- tion " the functional or active aspect. The Existence of the Image How Proved? — The image appears to be so entirely subjective that some writers have been led to question its very existence. Our knowledge of it seems to depend so exclusively upon the subject's introspection, it is so personal a possession, that we are in the position of having to IMAGINATION 129 accept the testimony of a single witness on it. Psy- chologists would like to find some objective proof of this introspection, some difference in behavior, or in external accomplishment which would correspond to the presence or absence of images, or which would be affected by the kind of image used. One line of evidence on the existence of the image comes from the spontaneous comments of persons who are not interested in either side of the controversy over images, who are not, in fact, thinking about psy- chology at all. For example, your friend comj:)lains that he cannot get rid of the tune which has been jingling in his head all day. Or you read such an item as this in the Public Ledger: " Marshal Putnik seldom if ever refers to a map. He has a gift unique among military men. Before his mind's eye he can see all Serbia spread out before him like a gigantic relief map, and he knows that map down to the most minute topographical details." Moreover, children often supply naive comments upon their imagery which can scarcely have been suggested by others. Aside from such casual data the psychologist must get systematic records. Galton's ^^ well-known ques- tionnaire was one of the earliest attempts of this kind. Ilis work (preceded by that of Fechner and Charcot) set stirring a number of imagery problems. Is it possible to divide people into the so-called imagery types, as " audiles," " visuals," etc. ? Do men 130 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY differ from women, do children differ from adults, or one class of workers from another, in the power to command images ? Is imagery educable ? The defect of Galton's method is the common defect of most questionnaires, that they ask the subject, who may or may not be trained in introspection, to answer from his experience at large. An improvement over the questionnaire is found in several of the association tests which have been used. Kraepelin ®^ asked his subjects to write lists of objects (a) characterized by their color ; (b) by their sound, (c) odor, etc. Secor ^° submitted to his subjects lists of words which were designed to call out special kinds of associated images. Pfeiffer's test as presented by Starch ^^ con- sists of a series of forty words, and after each of these the subject is told to write down the first associa- tion which comes as he reads the word. These asso- ciated words are then classified according to the type of image which they seem to indicate. As a result of this method used with a group of twenty-six persons, Starch gives the following distribution : Visual images 51.0 per cent., auditory 23.3 per cent., motor 14.5 per cent., tactile 9.5 per cent, miscellaneous 1.7 per cent. I gave the test to twelve young women, who were told to specify carefully, after the asso- ciations were written down, the sensory quality of their images. The distribution was (verbal images are recorded separately) : Visual 57.2 per cent., audi- IMAGINATION 131 tory 12.7 per cent., motor 0.2 per cent., tactile 3.3 per cent., visual verbal 3.9 per cent, auditory verbal 8.1 per cent., motor verbal (articnlatory) 1.6 per cent., miscellaneous 5.8 per cent. If these figures are to be compared with Starch's, the verbal images must be added in with others, and when this is done it appears that the only significant difference between the two is the rather greater ratio in my group of the visual images, and the slightly lesser proportion of the motor and tactile. If Starch's group includes men (a point which he does not specify), this difference would be in agreement with the traditional notion that women show some preference for visual imagery and men for motor. Another point illustrated by our results, which is in accord with a current view, is the preponderance of auditory verbal over visual verbal images, although in non-verbal material the visual outnumber the auditory images. A study of the subjective judgments of people as to the vividness and clearness of their imagery is reported by Betts,^* who finds that there is no strik- ing superiority, in this respect, of one kind of imagery over others. It has been contended by Segal, Mcumann and others, and amply illustrated in Fernald's ^^ work, that the type of image which a given person uses varies greatly with the conditions of the experiment. Hence the subject may be an " audile " in one task. 132 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY a " visual " in another, and a " motor " in a third ; nor is it at all unlikely that he may shift from moment to moment within the same task. It becomes, therefore, a matter of some interest to try to find tasks whose solution demands a given type of image, or at least gives the user of such imagery a decided advantage. Such problems, could they be found, would constitute objective tests of the presence of these images. Exercises which would seem to require the use of visual imagery are those which involve spatial rela- tions and color. We may mention first a test of Washburn's,®" employed by her to try the subject's control over visual images. The diagram of a square divided by lines into sixteen smaller squares is ex- posed for a few seconds, and then removed. The sub- ject is then asked to imagine an object moved about among those squares. Thus, starting from the upper left-hand corner, he must execute the following imagi- nary movements : " One square obliquely down and to right, two to right, two down, one to left, three up, one obliquely down to left, one to left, two down, two obliquely up to right, one to right," and so on. It is higlily probable that much more than merely visual features goes into the working of these series. I think, judging from the use of a modified form of the test as a class experiment, that the answers to some of the movements can be given numerically, and IMAGINATION 133 not l\y a visualized motion, but the visual image seems greatly to facilitate the doing of the test and is usu- ally present. Another task involving space relations, this time in three dimensions, is one of the problems used by Bctts.**** The subject must answer the following questions : " A three-inch cube, painted red, is sawed into inch cubes. How many cubes are there ? How many of the inch cubes have paint on three faces ? IIow many on two faces ? How many on one face ? IIow many have no paint on tliem ? " This test has been proposed also by Bolton "^ as ^^an excellent test of visual imagery." Of Betts's twenty-eight subjects all but four reported visual images for three or more of tlie questions. I find that these questions can be quickly and accu- rately answered by students who profess to use little or no visual imagery, but that the usual thing is for the subject to answer on the basis of visual and kin- esthetic images. Yet another test which involves appreciation of shape, position, and color is the following. A chart of nine simple designs as in Fig. 14, each painted in a single distinct color, is shown for thirty seconds. The subject is instructed that he is to reproduce the shapes, after the chart has been taken away, in their correct positions and colors. A box of water-color paints is provided which contains all the required 134 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY tones. This whole task seems at first to belong defi- nitely in the visual field, because the original stimulus is visual, and the means of reproduction and the final product are visual. But the reports of the sub- jects show that the intervening mental processes are by no means exclusively visual. I tried it upon twenty-one girls, between ten and twelve years of age. v Fig. 14. and upon twenty-five women. In the case of both groups the comments of the subjects indicate that those who scored well were the ones who translated their visual impressions of the chart into other terms. Some compared the figures to objects ; thus one child called the upper left-hand figure " a lemon with IMAGINATION 135 wings," and several called the next one a flag. Many located the colors as ''red in the upper right," and carried this impression in verbal form. Some made imitative motions with the hands as a mnemonic aid. Several, on the contrary, who scored poorly said that they depended wholly upon the visual image. Suc- cess, then, in this test appears to depend less upon the use of the visual image than upon the tendency to handle or work over the impression into something different. Angell ^^^ has pointed out this translating tendency as one of the conditions of mental grip on a given content. This test is quoted here to illus- trate how unsafe it is to argue a priori that the repro- duction in visual terms of a visual stimulus implies the use of the visual image. Probably the most successful of the tests which are designed to show the presence of the visual image is the one offered by Fernald,**^ in which the subject spells backwards the words of a given list, and his speed for each word is recorded along wuth his report on the type of image used. She writes as follows: " In general, we seem justified in saying that the re- sults indicate that the rapidity of this form of spell- ing-is favored by the ability to summon clear, vivid, and stable visual images of the' words without a very great need for accessory factors . . . we cannot rely upon this as a purely objective test, since it would lead us into many errors of diagnosis. As a partially 136 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY objective test, however, lending confirmation to the reports of the subjects, it would seem to be of greater value." I have repeated this test,^^^ selecting a more uniform series of words, and find m^'self in agree- ment with Fernald's estimate of the test. My ex- periments were made with twent^^-five girls, between the ages of ten and twelve, and twenty-five women, most of Avhom were about twenty-one years old. In both groups speed correlated with the use of the com- plete and clear visual picture of the word. There is little or no correlation between speed in this spelling test and success in the reproduction of the colored chart of the preceding test. It may be noted that in the spelling test the stimulus is given in auditory form, i.e., the words are pronounced by the experimenter, and are translated, by the best subjects, into visual form ; whereas in the colored-chart test the stimulus is presented visually but is changed by the subject into other images. Although the quest for a purely objective test of the image has not as yet met with success, still, there are various exercises which tend to throw into relief, some one, some another sort of image. The group just described does, on the whole, emphasize the visual image. Another test, also proposed by Fernald, in which the subject is asked to write down a list of words rhyming with a given word, seems to demand some use of auditory imagery. The ability to write IMAGINATION 137 a long list of rhyming words depends also upon vocabulary, but the realization that two words do rhyme, especially if they are spelled diversely, as rough and gruff, seems to call for the image of their sound. A device which brings into prominence, for some subjects, kinesthetic imagery of the grapho-motor sort, is the attempt to write in various reversals of the normal direction. Thus in Fig. 15 the second quadrant shows mirror-writing, the third shows v)^unLv7 yyyzi/p^vnj V[jcJ^^^ |r